Overview

This practical, online course is designed to help you improve your contract drafting skills.

You'll learn how to draft contracts which are:

• clear, correct, concise and consistent
• understood and interpreted correctly by stakeholders such as project managers, business executives, lawyers and judges

During the course you'll complete a number of practical exercises to help you apply the techniques you're learning about.

Course content

You'll learn about:

• when to use general writing techniques, and when to reject them
• examples of good and bad contract wording, what works and what doesn’t
• how wording can be tweaked to remove ambiguities and uncertainties
• improving the four Cs: clarity, correctness (accuracy), conciseness and consistency.

We'll also consider how the courts interpret contracts, but this won’t be the primary focus of the day.

This course is not focused on any one practice area. It's also not designed to help you do a better commercial deal, outsmart an opponent, or persuade a court to uphold a one-sided clause.

Who this course is for

This course is for anyone working with contracts who wants to hone their skills. 

Teaching and structure 

This course is run online over 2 consecutive days. You'll need to attend both days from 9.45am to 1pm. 

You'll need to download Zoom to your computer or use the online version of Zoom. You'll be sent the meeting id number and password on the Friday before your course.

You'll be able to access course materials via a SharePoint site.

Learning outcomes

This course will help you:

• understand of common drafting mistakes and pitfalls
• learn techniques for drafting clearer contracts
• practise your drafting skills by working on multiple, practical exercises
• receive feedback on how to improve your drafting

Costs and concessions

The standard price is £600.

A discounted price of £510 is available for:

• UCL Alumni
• UCL Institute of Brand and Innovation Law sponsoring firms
• NHS, Academic Institutions and NGOs

Course team

Mark Anderson

Mark is a practising solicitor, who is recommended in Chambers Directory for both life science transactions and IP. He's recommended in the international guide, IAM Patent 1000, as a leading UK lawyer in the field of IP licensing. His blog on IP contracts, IP Draughts, was made a member of the Blawg100 by the American Bar Association in 2012. He's a Certified Licensing Professional (a qualification established by the Licensing Executives Society (US and Canada)) and a Registered Technology Transfer Professional.

He's run CPD courses on IP and contract subjects since the 1990s. He's a visiting lecturer at the UCL Faculty of Laws, and is the course director of a 5-day course, Intellectual Property Transactions: Law and Practice, which is run by UCL’s Institute of Brand and Innovation Law. This course has won two awards: a Law Society Excellence Award (Highly Commended) in the Learning and Development category, and a UCL Provost’s Teaching Award.

Course information last modified: 13 Dec 2023, 15:53