In this post from a few months ago, I wrote about doing my first in-person Drafting Clearer Contracts presentation in four years. It involved little in the way of travel—just taking the Long Island Rail Road to Manhattan. But since then, I’ve done two out-of-town gigs. This is about one I did recently.
It was for a group of around 60 lawyers from a global company, and it was different from my usual presentations. My session was a small part of a gathering of company legal personnel. And the group included people with plenty of experience. (Some told me they’d been reading my blog for over ten years.) So instead of doing a three-hour or six-hour training session, I had an hour and a half.
I aimed to show them why my stuff matters, and I wanted my session to be entertaining, as unlikely as that might seem. So I spent an hour introducing them to some greatest hits from A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting—stuff that anyone serious about contracts would likely find compelling. For the remaining 30 minutes, I walked them through my annotated markup of their standard terms of service. I flagged plenty of issues, and I included references to where among my writings they could find further information. (That involved no discredit to their standard terms—I expect to be able to give that kind of treatment to pretty much any set of standard terms.)
From subsequent conversations, it appears my session was well-received. And I was gratified by the laughter—intentional!—it prompted. The dysfunction in traditional contract language is so ridiculous that it comes easy to me to turn it into unlikely comedy.
But for humor, you have to be able to read the room. And to read a room, you have to be in it! I couldn’t expect to achieve a similar effect on Zoom.
I expect that most of my presentations will remain remote. And the eight weekly sessions of Drafting Clearer Contracts: Masterclass will always be online only. But in-person sessions are fun, so I expect that I’ll continue to do them, and that clients will continue to ask for them, particularly when, as in this case, an organization is going out of its way to bring its contracts personnel together.
Of course, I have other responsibilities. The photo above is of Enzo, who spent a couple of days looking out the window and wondering where the heck I was. That’s OK—he can expect to hang with me for around 350 days of any given year!
