Commercial contract law, Drafting and Negotiations skills course

Can you negotiate a joint venture agreement?

Are you able to draft a watertight service level agreement?

Do you feel at ease drafting comprehensive shareholders agreement?

 If your answer to any of these questions is no, then you probably need to spend a little more time brushing up your contract drafting skills. Contract drafting is a highly rewarding skill that is also a mandatory tool every lawyer must have in their professional toolbox. Imagine for a moment that you are a layman, maybe a rich client in a hurry to get a contract in place before you can get started with making some profit. If you meet a lawyer who is not really great at negotiating or can't help with drafting great contracts, will you bother to save his number on your phone?

A well drafted contract will go a long way to ensure your client's interests are protected in any given circumstance. From simple employment agreements, lease or sell deeds to very long and extensive government contracts, there are all sorts of contracts, but lawyers are almost always called upon to draft and negotiate these. For every dispute that sees the day in the court, there are thousands of contracts that are drafted, negotiated and paid for. Well drafted contracts are often executed without any disputes, which makes the clients happy. When these well drafted contracts do go into a dispute, the wronged party usually has good remedies thanks to the contract signed.

Contract drafting, therefore, is a great public utility, that more and more Indians, both Individuals and companies, are using contract drafting services. Unfortunately, there are only a few lawyers who understand the art of contract drafting, and even fewer who understand how to negotiate.

Very often lawyers just try to manage by picking up not-so-good templates they can find, without being able to understand or address major issues since they never learned how to draft or negotiate that particular contract. The clients can often understand that the lawyer is doing a copy-paste template job, and never come back. After all, how difficult is it to find a template in today's world? People don't want to pay premium price for a template, they want expertise. What are you doing as a lawyer to build up and upgrade your expertise in contract drafting and negotiation?

Are you a law student with dreams of becoming a great commercial lawyer? Maybe you are practising law already? Do you want to upgrade your contract drafting and negotiation skills?

Practising corporate law is like operating in a shark tank. Everyone is out to become the numero uno. I only mention this as most young lawyers and students in India do not really understand how this space works. You have to have a deep understanding of the commercial laws of all the relevant fields as the businesses you deal with. Usually, lawyers earn that with years and years of experience of dealing with clients. There are slow ways to get there, and there are ways that speed up your professional development. Have you considered what you can perhaps do to become a better lawyer faster than most others?

Probably the most important skill you could possess here is drafting and negotiating any and all commercial contracts. As a lawyer, you will be called upon to advise your clients regarding their ventures, new hires or businesses. For you to be useful in this circumstances, you need to possess a great and efficient understanding of how contracts are drafted. Yes, you will work on templates. However, it takes training and expertise to hammer out a great contract even from a template.

Is contract drafting and negotiation really that lucrative?

Yes. Even more so than most people realise. However, it depends on what sort of contract you are negotiating. Imagine you are negotiating the lease of a commercial aeroplane. It is a huge asset, worth several million dollars. There are many things can go wrong. Naturally, a fairly lengthy contract is negotiated every time such an aircraft is leased out. Now just consider, if there are lawyers who are drafting and negotiating these agreements, how much they are probably getting paid? Of course, a lot more than people who are drafting house rent agreements, right?

Who are the biggest commercial lawyers in India? And why?

(from left to right: Ajay Bahl, Zia Mody, Bahram Vakil, Shardul Shroff and Cyril Shroff)

If you stop to think for a moment, what makes people like Bahram Vakil and  Ajay Bahl and Shardul and Cyril Shroff some of the best commercial lawyers in the country? Is it because of their high profile clients, big firms or name recognition? Well, yes to all. But what is responsible for that recognition? To put it simply, their legal skills. That is what separates these lawyers from the rest. They weren't born great lawyers, neither were they given boons by some deity, they are what they are today due to their skills and hard work.

Pick any case from their illustrious career and you will see what I mean. It is hard to find a suitable record of their cases as it is. Most of their cases were solved behind the closed doors of their firms and not in open court. That kind of dispute resolution acumen can only be as a result of superlative negotiation skills. If you can protect your clients' interests while ensuring that the dispute does not spill out into public record, now that would be a really cool lawyer move.

Lawsikho.com has for some time been actively involved in providing a detailed bit-by-bit discourse on drafting and negotiating commercial contracts with the help of their certificate course in Commercial Contract Law, Drafting and Negotiation. This course is designed for law students, practicing lawyers as well as entrepreneurs and business professionals. Enrollments to the course are now open. To register click here.

What is the need for the Certificate Course in Commercial Contract Law, Drafting and Negotiation?

Drafting and negotiating contracts happen to be very rewarding jobs. Most of the partners in corporate law firms, are after all, doing this most of the time. In terms of earning potential, career opportunities and growth to the lawyers who are good at it, it is one of the best ever options for lawyers. However, outside of experienced lawyers working at premiere law firms very few lawyers in India possess the requisite drafting skills. This is primarily because the legal curriculum in law schools across India do not train the students in contract drafting, let alone negotiation.

The knowledge that lawyers receive in most law colleges is the “What is this law?” part and not the “How” part regarding application of that law. Formal legal education deals with the Contracts Act and the case laws regarding them but with next to no clinical training, which leaves the law graduates on their own to learn contract drafting and negotiation.

Most lawyers develop drafting and negotiation skills on the fly, courtesy of umpteen trials and errors handling client matters. It is not really the best way to learn as it literally depends on failing until you finally learn all that you need.

A good lawyer with the right skills is supposed to guide the clients through all the stages of the drafting process like identifying the commercial interests, best practices in the industry, the actual drafting over several rounds of review and negotiation to eventual execution and contract management.

The certificate course in Commercial Contract Law, Drafting and Negotiation from Lawsikho is therefore a very important tool, as it does not only empower you with the knowledge lawyers require to draft and negotiate contracts but also make them efficient in doing so concerning all contractual matters in their daily legal practice.

Certificate Course in Commercial Contract Law, Drafting and Negotiation

iPleaders has an enviable collection of the most advanced legal courses in India and its courses have been pursued by thousands of individual students spread across twenty two countries so far. You can check out the faculty behind the course on the page itself. For more information click here.

The course on contract drafting and negotiation is a comprehensive course created by a world class team of lawyers who have a cumulative experience of over fifty years, drafting and negotiating contracts worth millions for top law firms, MNCs, startups and government projects.

It is a self paced, 3 month online course for lawyers and other professionals that can be accessed from your computer or mobile device 24x7 as soon as you enroll. This makes it that much easier for you to study and learn according to your personal preference without any deadline, allowing you absolute freedom over your own learning.

With this course, you can turn your unproductive time into productive. You can pull out your mobile and start studying while waiting in a queue, or traveling by a bus or cab or even a flight. You can download the material inside the app ahead of time and study while you have no internet connection as well. You can log into the course from anywhere anytime and study the best material available to learn contract drafting and negotiation with respect to major commercial contracts and learn from successful lawyers who can teach you best practices from around the world.

Syllabus

The course is regularly updated and improved by an industry-academia panel that includes law firm partners, celebrity litigators, bankers, investors and other top professionals with years of practical experience.

It is designed to help you learn all the practical skills related to contract drafting including risk mitigation clauses, operative clauses, boilerplate clauses and negotiations amongst others. It clearly takes into consideration all the contracts that are usually needed in a corporate career from employment agreements to vendor agreements, terms and conditions, government contracts, et cetera. All of these are demarcated into eight carefully curated modules as described below.

MODULE I: Creation Of Commercial Contracts
MODULE II: Remedies For Breach/Event Of Default
MODULE III: How To Draft A Commercial Contract?
MODULE IV: Operative Clauses In A Contract
MODULE V: How To Draft Risk Mitigation Clauses?
MODULE VI: How To Draft Boilerplate Clauses?
MODULE VII: Key Commercial Contracts
MODULE VIII: How To Effectively Negotiate Contracts?

Please go to this page to receive free sample material on contract drafting and negotiation.