Friends keep sending me contracts they created with ChatGPT or Claude.

They read well. The formatting is clean.

But essential clauses are often missing—or the terms don’t reflect the actual business deal.

Sometimes I revise heavily. Sometimes I start over.

This post isn’t about whether AI is capable.

It’s about whether the person prompting knows how contracts actually work in business.

A contract isn’t a CYA document like my friends think. It reflects how the parties have chosen to allocate risk, reflect their priorities, and protect relationships and business interests.

AI can assist with drafting. I use it. I teach it. But without commercial judgment, even the best prompt won’t protect the business.

We’re need to train future lawyers and all workers not to rely on AI but to partner with it.

At University of Miami School of Law, we’re preparing students to step into the real world—with both digital and business acumen.

In our Transactional Skills Program, students don’t learn theory.

They negotiate, redline, bill, meet with simulated clients, and use AI responsibly. They also work with real-world agreements—documents they’ll see in practice:

✅ NDAs, employment, and contractor agreements

✅ SaaS, MSAs, and licensing deals

✅ Escrow, loan

Miami in February. Sunhine. Mojitos. Superbowl Party. Contracts.

Yes. All of these things go together.

Registration is Now Open for Future Contracts Miami!

We’re thrilled to announce that the University of Miami School of Law will host the inaugural Future Contracts Miami conference on February 10-11, 2025!

Featured Topics

How AI is reshaping contracts for law firms and in-house

How UM Law is preparing future lawyers in the age of AI

The rise of contract standardization

Featured Speakers

Darryl Chiang, Director of Legal at Google
Juliet Astbury, Corporate Practice Leader, Dentons
Isabel Parker, Chief Innovation Officer, White & Case
Kyle Pankratz, VP Legal Operations, Mastercard
and so many more!

Event Details

February 10th-11th, 2025

University of Miami Shalala Student Center
1330 Miller Drive, Coral Gables, FL  33146

Featured Event Sponsors

Law Insider
HarveyAI
SimpleDocs

Exclusive Alumni Tickets

Thanks to our sponsors, we’re able to offer 40 FREE all-access passes* (including the Super Bowl Watch Party on Sunday, February 9th): 
 
Register here for your complimentary ticket

See you in Miami!

In law school, students take a professional responsibility exam and then take the MPRE exam. After graduation, they sit through (often boring) continuing legal education courses and try to get that precious ethics credit.

I don’t teach professional responsibility anymore, although I do speak about ethics in my Compliance, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability and my Business and Human Rights courses.

But as business professors, I’m not sure that we spend enough time talking about business ethics. Yes, it’s important to know about conflicts of interests but do we know how to advise our business clients on the issues that affect them?

I get to flex my “ethics” muscles in an interdisciplinary Innovation, Technology, and Design program housed in our School of Engineering, where I teach a course on Ethics, Equity, and Responsibility- basically Ethics and Technology.

They say grading is the worst part of being a professor.

But not this week.

My students in the ITD class brought me to tears reading their final exams.

I was impressed by their projects on regulating technologies like social media, cloning, AI, and robotics, and by their business plans and pitches for new innovations.

I would invest in some of them today if

I’m super excited to attend and moderate a panel on How to Improve Your Contract Skills with Gen AI Tools and Products at the ContractsCon in Las Vegas from January 22-23, 2025. As the GC for a startup and a nonprofit, and someone who directs the Transactional Skills Program for a law school, I have to stay up to date on the future of contracts for my clients and to prepare our students for a world that will be completely different from the one they expected.

This is not the typical boring CLE. How to Contract Founder, Laura Frederick describes it as “practical training for the work you do all the time.For every mega M&A transaction or financing, there are thousands of regular contracts that companies handle day-in and day-out. This training helps you learn how to do those BETTER with strategies based on best practices used by top lawyers with solid real-world in-house experience. Have a ton of experience already? This event is perfect for lawyers and professionals with 10+ years of contract experience too. We’ve added a whole day of training built to teach advanced contract skills. Plus you can connect with your peers and help out

Depending on who you talk to, you get some pretty extreme perspectives on generative AI. In a former life, I used to have oversight of the lobbying and PAC money for a multinational company. As we all know, companies never ask to be regulated. So when an industry begs for regulation, you know something is up. 

Two weeks ago, I presented the keynote speech to the alumni of AESE, Portugal’s oldest business school, on the topic of my research on business, human rights, and technology with a special focus on AI. If you’re attending Connecting the Threads in October, you’ll hear some of what I discussed.

I may have overprepared, but given the C-Suite audience, that’s better than the alternative. For me that meant spending almost 100 hours  reading books, articles, white papers, and watching videos by data scientists, lawyers, ethicists, government officials, CEOs, and software engineers. 

Because I wanted the audience to really think about their role in our future, I spent quite a bit of time on the doom and gloom scenarios, which the Portuguese press highlighted. I cited the talk by the creators of the Social Dilemma, who warned about the dangers of social

People rarely keep resolutions, much less ones they don’t make for themselves, but here are some you may want to try.

  1. Post information about the law and current events that lay people can understand on social media. You don’t need to be a TikTok lawyer and dance around, but there’s so much misinformation out there by “influencers” that lawyers almost have a responsibility to correct the record.
  2. Embrace legal tech. Change is scary for most lawyers, but we need to get with the times, and you can start off in areas such as legal research, case management, accounting, billing, document automation and storage, document management, E-discovery, practice management, legal chatbots, automaton of legal workflow, contract management, artificial intelligence, and cloud-based applications. Remember, lawyers have an ethical duty of technological competence.
  3. Learn about legal issues related to the metaverse such as data privacy and IP challenges.
  4. Do a data security audit and ensure you understand where your and your clients’ data is and how it’s being transmitted, stored, and destroyed. Lawyers have access to valuable confidential information and hackers know that. Lawyers also have ethical obligations to safeguard that information. Are you communicating with clients on WhatsApp

Please join me for this ABA Conference on February 10-11. I’m excited to serve as a mock board member on the 11th as well as on the plenary panel on “Leading Voices in ESG Initiatives” with representatives from United Airlines, Microsoft Asia, and others focusing on the many and sometimes conflicting imperatives of implementing ESG goals. I’ll be particularly interested in the session by the General Motors GC, who will speak about the plan to go away from gasoline-powered vehicles, which GM just announced.

You can register by clicking here.

About the Virtual Conference:

The state of New York, on December 9, 2020, announced that its pension fund with over $226 billion in assets would divest its oil and gas stocks in companies that, in its view, contribute to global warming. The announcement emphatically highlights how ESG factors (Environmental, Social and Governance) across borders represent business risks but also opportunities for companies, their stockholders, and their other stakeholders. In-house legal departments are the first line of defense to re-orient business operations to address global ESG issues and to identify risks. These challenges, risks and opportunities are creating additional demands on legal departments with constrained resources as they navigate this