Photo: NYU School of Law. Judith Germano, co-director of the NYU Center for Cybersecurity.
NYU School of Law has launched a Cybersecurity Clinic, established this summer with support from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, that offers free cyber-defense help to organizations that could never afford it on their own. Announced on 7 July 2026, the clinic is housed at the NYU Center for Cybersecurity and joins a national Consortium of Cybersecurity Clinics. Our congratulations to the school.
What the clinic does
The clinic gives hands-on cybersecurity support to under-resourced, mission-driven organizations, nonprofits, community health clinics, shelters, legal-aid services, and K-12 schools, the kinds of institutions that hold sensitive data but cannot afford a security team. Its distinctive feature is who does the work: NYU law students are paired with NYU engineering students, under faculty supervision, so that clients get both the technical and the legal side of the problem at once. Together they run trainings, map systems and find vulnerabilities, and help build governance strategies against threats ranging from attacks on critical infrastructure to online fraud, extortion, and deepfakes.
"The new clinic enables us to reach high-risk, low-resourced organizations," said Judith H. Germano, co-director of the NYU Center for Cybersecurity, which houses the clinic, and a former federal prosecutor. She noted that many breaches trace back to the basics: "Many problems we've seen even in recent years have to do with fairly basic mistakes and vulnerabilities, such as a lack of multi-factor authentication or a failure to disable software that was no longer in use, failed password protocols, and a lack of rigor around good cybersecurity practices."
Why it matters
Cybersecurity clinics usually live in engineering schools. Anchoring one in a law school, and aiming it squarely at organizations that serve the vulnerable, reframes cyber-resilience as a matter of access to justice rather than just technology. It also trains a generation of lawyers and engineers to think about the legal, policy, and technical sides of a breach together, from the start. As Professor Damon McCoy, who co-directs the center, put it, the organizations the clinic will serve "can't afford to hire many different kinds of experts", so the clinic brings the experts to them.
For NYU law students
NYU Law students and alumni have complimentary access to LegalAlphabet, where they can search legal jobs and internships worldwide, including technology and privacy roles. Visit the NYU Law campus page, browse current openings on the United States legal jobs board, or read more from our Law School News desk.
Sources
This report is based on the announcement published by NYU School of Law, with additional detail from NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Quotations are drawn from those announcements.
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