Our presentation at Emory Law’s Fourth Biennial Conference, Educating the Transactional Lawyer of Tomorrow, was based on an article we co-wrote that has been published in the University of Hawaii Law Review: 36 U. Haw. L. Rev. 403 (2014). The article describes a classroom exercise for a transactional drafting course. Before we get to the exercise itself, we want to explain our thought process in putting together this exercise, about the utility of the exercise, and about how it fits into the larger context of preparing our students to practice in transactional settings.

As we were preparing the class exercise and the article, we began to feel a tension in teaching skills and drafting courses. There is a need to teach drafting skills in a context in which our students will see them as practicing attorneys. For example, in first year civil procedure, students may actually draft a complaint or an interrogatory. In most transactional drafting classes, the students use Tina Stark’s book and draft an aircraft purchase agreement. This is valuable and the students need that exposure, and it is critical that they see these documents before they are tasked with creating them in practice.