Hi everyone!
I’m back from vacation and super excited about all the big projects in the works at How to Contract has ahead. Rin Santiago and I have been building out a fantastic webinar series with important topics coming in the months ahead. We’ll be sharing a lot more about ContractsCon in the weeks ahead as we get closer to the end of our early bird pricing period on July 15.
Our biggest development is my launch this past Monday of a new email series. I’ll be sharing training insights from past webinars on a single AI product provision or narrow concept explained by our experts in past webinars. The first issue focused on AI incident reporting obligations. I’ve added the link below in case you missed it. Keep a look out for the next edition on Monday. It’s a great way for you and your team to get in some micro-learning when things are busy.
As always, thank you so much for your support. You make all this possible.
- Laura Frederick, CEO at How to Contract 🥸❤️
Here’s what’s included in this week’s newsletter:
QUICK TAKE
What to Do Before You Negotiate AI Training Clauses
One of the first questions many of us ask when reviewing an AI vendor contract is whether the vendor or underlying model trains on our data. We get a "no," check the box, and move on.
Olga Mack pushed back on that sequence in our recent webinar on AI vendor compliance and governance. She made the case that asking about training data before mapping how the vendor's AI actually works can lead to drafting around a risk that does not exist. The data map, she suggested, must come before the language.
AI CONTRACT DRAFTING
Learn How to Draft AI Incident Requirements Provisions
I’ve launched a new email series with mini-lessons on how to draft a specific provision in AI product contracts. These lessons include a video segment from our webinar diving deep into the topic, a breakdown of the provision with its problems and their fixes, plus other takeaways and insights. Read the first lesson below!
FREE TRAINING
Upcoming CLE Webinars
Here are our upcoming training programs, all with CLE (pending) and sponsored by Spellbook.
OUR SPONSOR
Get 10% Off When You Subscribe to Spellbook!
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.
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Learn Business Judgment With Our Library of 220+ Hours of Expert Training Videos
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
When Your Contracting Role Becomes More About Stealth and Evasion
Every promise to turn a contract draft by a particular date should include a disclaimer like this one: "Please allow for an additional 2 to 5 business days after I complete my edits for me to nag and stalk the stakeholders who have disappeared and are not responding to my approval requests."
CONTRACT TIPS
Drafting the Requirement to Destroy or Return all Confidential Information
This contract tip is about the requirement to destroy or return all confidential information.
Most NDAs and confidentiality provisions require the receiving party to destroy or return all confidential information upon request or after termination.
We are all grownups here, so let's be honest with each other. How many companies do you estimate actually destroy or return 100% of it? My estimate? 1%. Wait, maybe that is too generous. It is probably closer to .1% or .01%.
The reason that so few comply is because, as these clauses are often written, it is impossible to do so. We live in a world where most of the confidential information is stored in digital format. Even if we try to delete, there are backups and backups of those backups. And even if a company is amazing at record retention practices, I guarantee that some of the counterparty's information is still in a file somewhere.
We need to move to a more workable and realistic approach. My preference is:
- Exclude any confidential information stored in accordance with its record retention policies
- Require ongoing compliance with the confidentiality and non-use obligations for so long as it's there.
🥸 Here are a few more contract tips I recently posted on LinkedIn:
Let us know if you have any questions or feedback by replying to this email or email us directly at [email protected]. We are so grateful for our amazing contracts community.
All my best,
Laura Frederick, Founder and CEO @ How to Contract
