Tom Sharbaugh, Supervising Editor

Tom Sharbaugh is a Professor of Practice at Penn State Law in University Park and the Director of the law school’s Entrepreneur Assistance Clinic, which is based at the Happy Valley LaunchBox in downtown State College. Before joining Penn State’s faculty, Tom was a business lawyer for several decades in Philadelphia. He was the firm-wide managing partner of operations at Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, a global law firm based in Philadelphia, a position he held for 15 years. As a partner in the firm’s business group, he represented a wide variety of clients in transactional and corporate matters, including private equity funds in M&A and investment transactions and start-up and early-stage businesses in their formation and funding.

The Entrepreneur Assistance Clinic provides a wide range of business services to start-up and early-stage businesses throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania irrespective of whether they have any relationship to Penn State. The Clinic works closely with the various economic development groups throughout Pennsylvania, including the 16 Small Business Development Centers, Ben Franklin Technology Partners, and Penn State’s network of 21 LaunchBoxes. The Clinic serves small businesses that cannot afford traditional legal representation and that often choose to ignore legal issues or attempt “do-it-yourself” solutions from the Internet. Students at Penn State Law staff the clinic, subject to the supervision of two full-time licensed attorneys.