I’ve just added four new series of Drafting Clearer Contracts: Masterclass to take us through the end of the year. Here are the five series now available:
- Starting Tuesday, 13 July 2021, at 8:00 am ET (US)
- Starting Thursday, 5 August 2021, at 11:00 am ET (US)
- Starting Wednesday, 8 September 2021, at 11:00 am ET (US)
- Starting Tuesday, 5 October 2021, at noon ET (US)
- Starting Monday, 1 November 2021, at 11:00 am ET (US)
Masterclass will always be a work in progress. To give you a sense of what I’m currently thinking about, here’s what I recently sent a group of participants:
Hi, participants in Masterclass! Some thoughts:
Digital Credentials
The digital credentials now work! Once you complete the course you’ll get a spiffy badge you can share on LinkedIn and elsewhere, as well as a certificate. But what’s more interesting for me is how the digital credentials might change how participants take the course. To get the credentials, you have to do what many participants probably haven’t done—click your way methodically through all the lessons in the curriculum. And that includes the quizzes.
So now I’ll know that anyone who gets the digital credentials will have taken the quizzes. For reasons explored in this blog post, I see my role primarily as a facilitator, not an evaluator. But what the heck, if the digital credentials encourage someone to take the quizzes rather than use that time in any number of other ways, I think that’s a positive development.
Preparation
I encourage you to think of our weekly sessions as the least important part of the course. What matters most is the work you put in. Reading and rereading parts of MSCD, while bearing in mind that it’s a reference work rather than something to be swallowed whole. Taking the quizzes and doing targeted research in MSCD to better understand why the correct answers were correct and the wrong answers were wrong, then taking the longer quizzes again, and then taking them a third time.
And if part of a session is devoted to considering the problems in a document, you’ll get more out of our discussion if you devote an hour to looking at the document and considering for yourself what the problems are. For example, in session 4 we’ll discuss a contract that has some defined-term problems highlighted. To understand what those problems are, you’ll have to spend some time using Ctrl+F to explore the document. I think that’s more interesting than waiting for me to tell you what the problems are.
Participating
It’s 2021, so do what you feel comfortable doing. But I encourage you to participate, by speaking up or by using the chat function—it makes things more interesting for everyone. Don’t be concerned about saying something silly; that’s a time-honored part of learning.
And if being on video isn’t a big deal for you, then join me on video, as often or as infrequently as you wish. It can be a little sobering for me to face a phalanx of black, muted squares.
That’s it for now! If you have any comments or questions, I’d be pleased to receive them. I look forward to seeing you next week.
Ken
