Dylan Towns, ’18
O’Melveny & Myers LLP, Los Angeles, CA
Michigan Law offers a broad range of opportunities and resources to its students to encourage them to follow their preferred path.
For Dylan Towns, a corporate and transactional attorney, it was the hands on experience he gained as a student attorney for the Entrepreneurship Clinic that ultimately shaped his future.
“I found myself filling a role similar to a client’s general counsel or as part of their business team,” he says. “It was enlightening, especially from a student’s perspective, to work with entrepreneurs in their early stages of business development and support them on everything from entity formation to protecting intellectual property to negotiating contracts.”
Through the Entrepreneurship Clinic, Towns learned that the determinations he made and recommended to clients had real ramifications.
“In a classroom, a mistake may affect your own academic prospects, but in a clinic and in practice, a mistake could be catastrophic for your clients,” says Towns. “Becoming comfortable with that responsibility helped prepare me for the working environment I entered when I moved to California to practice in the emerging companies, venture capital, and M&A space.”
It was enlightening, especially from a student’s perspective, to work with entrepreneurs in their early stages of business development and support them on everything from entity formation to protecting intellectual property to negotiating contracts.
The resources from the Michigan Law community that Towns received from day one—including a scholarship that enabled him to attend in the first place—continued throughout his time in Ann Arbor.
Such resources ranged from support for the Michigan Law Hockey Team to supplementing travel expenses so he could attend the regional Transactional Law Competition. Moreover, in his first year, eager to practice in Southern California, he called alumni out west to ask for advice.
“Not only did everyone graciously take my calls, one alumna even offered me a job at her firm for my 1L summer,” says Towns. “Without the opportunities, resources, and connections afforded to me by the University of Michigan, I am not sure I would have been able to land the career I have today. Who knows where I would be without Michigan Law?”