Social entrepreneurs build ventures — for-profit, nonprofit, or hybrid — designed to solve a social or environmental problem as a central part of the business model, not as an afterthought or a marketing angle. Impact investors, in turn, put capital into those ventures seeking a measurable social or environmental return alongside (or sometimes instead of) a purely financial one.

Lawyers working in this space need to be fluent in structures that don’t fit neatly into the traditional nonprofit/for-profit divide — benefit corporations, L3Cs, cooperatives, and blended-finance vehicles — and in helping founders build legal documents (bylaws, investor agreements, mission-lock provisions) that protect a social mission even as a company grows, changes hands, or takes on new investors.

The Grunin Center for Law and Social Entrepreneurship at NYU School of Law is a leading hub for this field. It educates students and practicing lawyers on the legal issues involved, publishes research on law and policy developments, and — together with the Impact Investing Legal Working Group — hosts an annual conference each June in New York that draws hundreds of lawyers, students, and other stakeholders from around the world to explore the legal, ethical, and social questions facing the field.

For integrative lawyers, this practice area sits naturally alongside Conscious Business and Reinventing Contracts: the same values-based, stakeholder-aware approach that shapes a Conscious Contract also shapes the legal architecture that lets a social enterprise stay true to its purpose over time.