Emory Law Transactional Law and Skills Conference

It was great to see co-blogger Marcia Narine Weldon (albeit briefly) at the Sixth Biennial Conference: To Teach is to Learn Twice: Fostering Excellence in Transactional Law and Skills Education hosted by Emory Law's Center for Transactional Law and Practice.  I had the opportunity to present and attend some of the presentations on Friday.  I had to leave Saturday morning to teach Contract Law to ProMBA students in Knoxville Saturday afternoon, however, and missed hearing half the conference program as a result.  Even on Friday, due to the number of super concurrent sessions, I had to forego a lot of great presentations.  Consequently, I was delighted to read Marcia's post on Tina Stark's presentation.  Great stuff.

At the conference, I offered insights on my document "treasure hunt" teaching method in a "try this" session on Friday afternoon.  More specifically, I talked about and demonstrated a corporate finance treasure hunt.  After laying a substantive and practical foundation, I sent the audience, some of whom are not corporate finance folks, on a search for blank check preferred stock provisions in Delaware corporate charters.  Then, I called on them to share their search logic and make observations about what they found, relating their treasure to the example I had given them.  They did so well with this exercise!  Everyone found a blank check stock provision, and many in the audience were willing to talk about what they found.

I went to several other "try this" sessions on Friday (billed as forums "for individual presenters to demonstrate in-class activities").  They included:

The Creative Aspect of Transactional Lawyering: Structuring the Transaction and Drafting the Agreement to Resolve a Legal Issue

John F. Hilson
UCLA School of Law

Stephen L. Sepinuck
Gonzaga University School of Law

Teaching Contract Law, Terms, and Practice Skills Through Problems

Nadelle Grossman
Marquette University Law School

Teach the Basics of Contract Drafting, Corporate Governance & Transactional Law in One Sentence

Neil J. Wertleib
UCLA School of Law

Each session offered much to think about, a hallmark of this conference.  I plan to consider over the course of the summer--and beyond--how I may use some of the demonstrated techniques in my teaching and writing.  The proceedings of the conference will be published in principal part in Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law, UT Law's business law journal, during the 2018-19 academic year.  I will try to remember to let folks know when that volume of Transactions is available.

This week, I am off to New York and Toronto for two additional conferences (in New York, the Impact Investing Legal Working Group (IILWG)/Grunin Center for Law and Social Entrepreneurship’s 2018 Conference on “Legal Issues in Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing–in the US and Beyond,” and in Toronto, the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting on "Law at the Crossroads: Le Droit à la Croisée des Chemins").  I am at the airport waiting for my first (delayed) flight as a type this.  I expect to be able to report out on both next week.