Hi everyone!

With the Memorial Day holiday behind us, we’ve fully shifted into summer mode. I’m right there, spending some time away this week with family. But How to Contract continues to move forward with lots of big projects. Those include adding to our huge expert training library and expanding our new free resources site. We’ve also been diligently working on building our summer webinar program, with lots of new topics and speakers over the months ahead.

The biggest change you’ll see this week is ending the Monday email format with upcoming webinars. We’ll be replacing it with a new second weekly Monday newsletter focused on training insights for drafting and negotiating AI contracts. The inaugural issue kicks off on Monday, so keep a look out for it.

As always, thank you so much for your support. You make all this possible.

- Laura Frederick, CEO at How to Contract 🥸❤️

QUICK TAKE

I’ve been feeling hesitant lately about investing a lot of time into mastering Claude for Legal and other new AI tools and workflow strategies. I get thinking that maybe I should hold off until they stabilize. After all, the ones coming out now are probably going to be replaced soon anyway.

Colin Lachance’s answer to a question during How to Contract’s recent webinar about Claude for Legal helped me realize how much risk I’m taking on with that attitude.

FREE TRAINING

Here are 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!

MEMBERSHIP BENEFITS

How to Contract’s massive library now includes over 220 hours of training videos featuring experts on all the commercial and tech transactions topics we’ve covered in our programs over the past five and a half years. Need to understand how to do a contract amendment? There’s a video training on that. Want to learn about synthetic data in AI contracts? We’ve got one on that too. Head over to our site to learn more about the insights you’ll gain access to as a How to Contract member.

MEME OF THE WEEK

We are all seeing an uptick in crazy contract redlines and negotiation demands. It’s clear people are asking their AI tool what to say. Perhaps if we send them these certificates after each normal negotiation we’ll see better behavior would prevail. Are you ready to try it?

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.

TIPS

This contract tip is about what makes someone a great contract lawyer.

We do not become great because we blindly follow contract academics' instructions on how to write each contract provision. If that were true, we could all be replaced tomorrow with an artificial intelligence contract drafting program.

We do not become great because we memorize the law and know the applicable statutes. If that were true, we would task contract negotiations to law school professors.

Technical drafting skills and knowledge of the law are important. But what differentiates the great contract lawyers is that they understand the psychology part of it.

They know what their counterparts are thinking, what is important to them, how best to communicate with them, and how to build enough rapport to reach an agreement.

Great contract lawyers and professionals know how to apply their knowledge of drafting techniques to make edits that persuade the counterparty.

They know which words to include or omit from a tactical perspective, not just an academic one.

They know how to read the other side to decide when to hold fast and when to concede.

If you want to become a great contract lawyer, don't just focus on the words and the law. You also need to focus on understanding the people involved and their motivations.

What do you see as the most important differentiator between good contract lawyers and great ones?

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