Hi everyone! Welcome to our weekly newsletter. I’m so thrilled with our new Resources platform we moved to last week. Now it’s so much easier for us to share all the insights and strategies learned from our hundreds of speakers over the past almost six years of doing contract training programs. It will take a while to identify the best resources and add them, so stay subscribed or return occasionally to this new site to see what we’ve added.

My big focus other than getting ready for a few vacations coming up is spreading the word about ContractsCon 2026. It is turning out better than I thought when I dreamed up the murder mystery theme. We have most of the speakers lined up and the operational logistics in place. Head over to our website to get caught up on what we have in store.

Thank you to the contracts community for all your support of our webinars, our newsletter, and everything else. I am so grateful.

- Laura Frederick, CEO at How to Contract 🥸❤️

Here’s are quick links to the newsletter’s sections:

QUICK TAKE

I learned a lot about agentic AI during our webinar this week featuring Yelena Ambartsumian and Anastasia Vener in our webinar this week. One thing that Yelena said really stuck with me. She pointed out that our AI governance laws, including the EU AI Act, were written around generative AI. They were not written around AI agents, and they were definitely not written around agentic AI.

CLE WEBINARS

Here are a few of our upcoming training programs, all with CLE (pending) and sponsored by Spellbook.

You can skip the hassle of registering for individual webinars by registering once for all of them. Head over to our webinar page to sign up today!

CONTRACTSCON

ContractsCon 2026 continues to move full speed ahead. We’ll be sharing more about the training agenda next week, but if you want to go peek at our new updated website, you can see who will be leading our training this year. I’m so grateful to these speakers for sharing their expertise with the rest of us. If you want to learn more about the individual sessions, you can also check out these posts from this site.

MEME OF THE WEEK

Click the image to read the comments left on my LinkedIn post by a lot of frustrated contract folks.

OUR SPONSOR

Our sponsor, Spellbook, is offering the contracts community 10% off your first year's subscription if you attend a Spellbook-sponsored webinar or fill out this form. Spellbook offers an incredible legal AI suite for transactional lawyers and legal teams that lets you draft, review, and redline contracts 10x faster, right in Word.

IN DEPTH

Standard NDAs work for most business disclosures. But you may need enhanced protection when you're sharing the trade secrets and proprietary processes that give you a competitive advantage. In this article, I share the 10 ways that I add additional operational protections for higher-risk NDAs.

TIPS

This contract tip explains an essential part of every assignment provision.

Every contract that restricts assignment should say that any attempted assignment that violates the restriction is void. This phrase is powerful as it goes beyond just restricting the party. It removes the ability of the party to act in violation of that restriction.

Let's start with what happens if you do NOT include the phrase.

Say the contract prohibits the assignment of its rights and obligations but is silent about being void if attempted. Then a party violates that restriction and enters into an agreement to assign it to a third party.

Sure, the party that violated the restriction would be in breach of the agreement and may be liable for damages.

But most courts in the U.S. would allow that assignment to take place. They consider it an agreement breach like any other.

But if the contract includes the void language, the party has no authority to assign. Even if the party tries to assign, it is as if the assignment never happened.

Of course, courts may find equitable reasons to reach a different outcome, so we never know for sure. But including the void language gives you a much stronger case to stop that assignment.

🥸 Here are a few more tips I recently posted on LinkedIn: