Masterclass: Some Early Feedback

This past week I wrapped up the first three series (apart from trial series) of my new online course Drafting Clearer Contracts: Masterclass.

On thing that’s clear is that for many people, pandemic life is hectic. I ended up moving several people to a later series because of some crisis or other. And plenty of people missed sessions for various reasons.

With several series of Masterclass on the go, it’s been interesting keeping track of what needs doing. So far, nothing too embarrassing has happened.

The premise of Masterclass is with the reading, assignments, and quizzes, and with me being in your face for eight weekly live hour-long sessions, you’ll make much more progress toward being an informed consumer of contract language than you would be if you were handed a copy of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting and left to your own devices. So far, I think that’s the way it’s working out.

I’m still collecting feedback, but here’s what two participants had to say in the past 24 hours:

I’ve even recommended the course to our parent company’s in-house lawyer. Simply put, I enjoyed the course. It has inspired me to do better at contract drafting. I am responsible for our form of agreements, and I now have some serious work to do in order to fix the contracting mistakes taken from copy and paste over the years. I know this will take some time and a lot of practice but I am up for the challenge and looking forward to improving our documents. … Oh and the presenter—he was great too.

I thought the course was fantastic. I learned a bunch and will highly recommend it to others. The rigor of the course is critical in learning the material, which I enjoyed much more than a typical CLE lecture or presentation. It was like going back to school in a sense and the online classes were seamless. The schedule of one class per week with one hour sessions worked well for me. I also think your website platform for the course is nicely done. You get out of it what you put into it, so if the participants understand off the bat they should read the material, do the exercises, and get engaged they will learn a ton. I also hope they understand this is just the beginning of a journey and the course provides a tremendous start. Learning how to draft contracts the right way is not easy, especially when contrasted with how easy it was to learn traditional contract drafting (thoughtlessly cutting and pasting from precedent contracts). It takes lots of time, thought, and practice, but regardless of how far down the path one goes they will be much better and confident drafters.

If you’re tempted, new series start on 5 October and 20 October.

Updated 30 September 2020: Here’s what another participant had to say:

I really enjoyed the course. I’m sorry I couldn’t attend all the live sessions, as work happened to be very busy during this time period, but I did watch the recordings.

In terms of feedback, I only have positive things to say. I thought the live sessions were great and I enjoyed participating. I really benefitted from going through the exercises together in class, and hearing both your and others people’s opinions. You presented the material in a clear style and I also enjoyed your jokes!

The quizzes and assignments were very helpful as they tested my knowledge. I liked how the quizzes and your comments on my assignments pointed to the exact section(s) in the textbook where the answer comes from. I also like that the course was very practical because we reviewed and drafted actual contracts. Finally, I really appreciated you being so responsive to my questions via email!

Thanks very much again for a great course! The resources provided are extremely helpful, so I’m happy to still be able to refer to them. I learned a lot, so overall this course was a very good use of my time.