Contract drafting is the number one skill required by lawyers for performing any commercial work.
Irrespective of whether you choose litigation, in-house counsel job or end up working in a law firm this skill is going to be indispensable for your role.
As a law student, law of contracts is one of the first subjects taught in law school.
Despite that you will find fresh law graduates struggling to draft a contract from the scratch.
They mostly end up borrowing a template from somewhere and amending the details when necessary.
The biggest victims of such practices are the clients, as a badly drafted contract can cost the client millions – remember, the enforceability depends on your drafting.
I am sure you don’t want that to happen in your career especially when it is so difficult to build a client base after you start practicing. Such incidents make you lose other clients and that can just be the beginning of the downfall of your successful career in independent practice.
You can prevent this early on in your career by learning drafting skills.
Not only that, you open several avenues for yourself and increase your earning potential multiple times.
Imagine being able to pursue litigation by financially supporting your independent practice by drafting and vetting commercial contracts by the side.
Or being able to study for competitive exams and not having to worry about securing your future financially.
As a law student and as a lawyer you often hear stories about other lawyers charging a lot of money for drafting and negotiating contracts and wonder how they do it.
However when a lucrative commercial contract work comes your way you are intimidated and pass it on to your colleague since you think you lack credibility to undertake the task.
I remember the first time during my internship I was asked to proofread a set of 20 lease agreements between the landowners and an industrial owner.
I was also provided the negotiation brief along with it since some owners had different set of terms.
Apart from cross-checking the details of the owners and property details in the schedule I wasn’t able to contribute any further. Although I thought I was learning a lot by simply reading those agreements, my contribution to the job was next to none.
After multiple internships and working with a lawyer for six months, the real test of my drafting skills was when I was asked to draft a Joint Development Agreement (JDA) on behalf of a Developer.
I was supposed to submit the first draft of JDA in three days and I remember struggling with just the rights of developers and owners for the first two days and other terms were still to be worded into a document.
I managed to borrow a template from a former colleague but was unable to fit any of those clauses in my agreement since the arrangement agreed between the developer and the landowners was unique and the client demanded to put that in writing.
I remember going sleepless nights and calling multiple seniors and former colleagues for assistance. Honestly I was nervous since the property to be developed ran in crores of rupees and the rights and liabilities of the parties were to be drawn by me.
I ran multiple scenarios in my head where my words could be ambiguous or worried that important regulations such as DCPR or MCGM were not included. Again and again I imagined how a court would interpret my clauses under different situations.
Law students have a common misconception that drafting can only be learnt from seniors during internships and jobs.
Internships are not the place to learn but to perform. If you are able to draft contracts and negotiate on behalf of the clients you automatically have an advantage over other interns to secure a PPO in the firm/company.
If you are able to pitch to a law firm that your drafting skills can free some space for senior associates to do other work like client acquisition or attending to more matters you may be able to secure a paid internship for yourself.
Although lawyers and law students are amply aware of the importance of this skill they often fail to learn it early.
Imagine if you were able to learn the legal drafting skill in law school
Or if you were able to draft contracts from scratch work from day-1 of your job.
It will be foolish to dream of your independent practice without the skill of legal drafting and negotiation in your quiver.
Do you want to learn the most important skills of a lawyer?
Are you not sure how you can get started?
How do you reach out to freelancing clients to secure contract drafting assignments?
Is it possible to do this kind of work while you’re still in law school?
We are coming to answer these questions and many more.
Ramanuj Mukherjee (CEO & Co-founder, LawSikho) and Abhyuday Agarwal (COO & Co-founder, LawSikho) are undertaking an exhaustive boot camp for 9 hours spread over three days from 17th to 19th April from 6PM onwards where we will deal with all of these questions for FREE.
Over the three days, we will discuss the following themes:
Day 1: What kind of jobs and freelancing opportunities can you get with good contract drafting skills?
Day 2: Your roadmap to acquiring solid contract drafting skills and acquiring freelancing opportunities in India and abroad
Day 3: 10 most important contracts that you need to learn to draft and how should you go about learning to draft these.
For those who have already registered, we are looking forward to seeing you.
We recommend you to block your calendar from 17-19 April, 6-9pm.
For others, registrations are still open and seats are filling up rapidly.
As you read this email we are getting more than 30 registrations per hour for this boot camp.
Who should attend this workshop?
- Law students who are looking to excel in their internships.
- Law students who are unclear about the area of law they want to specialise in.
- Law students who are interested in becoming financially independent by securing freelance contract drafting work.
- Lawyers who want to earn additional money by doing freelance work.
- In-house counsels or lawyers working in legal departments of companies who are interested in understanding the impact of the contracts entered into by their employer companies.
- Lawyers / CAs / CSs advising startups and are looking to extend their domain of work to include drafting in addition to compliance.
- Litigators who are looking to earn additional funds by generating clients for contract drafting work.
Registration link of the bootcamp: https://lawsikho.com/contractdraftingbootcamp
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