Marcia Narine Weldon

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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…

In my previous post on a November 7th Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) panel on ESG through the life cycle of a business, I outlined the shifting landscape of ESG in the wake of recent regulatory and social developments in the U.S. This follow-up provides more detail on the insights shared by my fellow panelists, Eugenia Maria Di Marco and Ahpaly Coradin, who explored ESG in the contexts of startups, international markets, private equity, and M&A. As President-elect Trump continues to name cabinet members and advisors, I and others expect that ESG issues will continue to be a hot button issue here in the US.

Ahpaly shared his perspective on ESG trends, particularly in private equity. Although he acknowledged that in the US, interest in ESG is waning, many PE firms still screen for ESG risks at the initial target selection stage and during due diligence. Larger firms see market positioning and risk mitigation as the main benefits of ESG. However, revenue growth and capital allocation are not primary motivators due to the lack of data. He noted that many limited partners are increasingly deploying capital away from sectors like tobacco, alcohol, and to a lesser…

It’s the day after Thanksgiving so I’ll post part 2 of my discussion in ESG in the Trump/Vance era next week.

Today, as students are stressed out over finals, here’s a post to brighten their day. Please share and forward far and wide.

We are pleased to invite your school to send a team to participate in the inaugural University of Miami Transactional Skills Competition, designed to provide law students with an unparalleled opportunity to refine their transactional lawyering skills in a challenging and dynamic setting.

In keeping with the vibrant culture of Miami, the details and challenges for this competition will be sophisticated, unexpected, and innovative, embodying the city’s forward-thinking ethos. This competition presents a distinctive opportunity for law students to engage with real-world, progressive transactional scenarios in emerging industries.

Unlike traditional moot court or contract negotiation contests, this event invites participants to navigate the complexities of contract drafting while considering broader business factors. Through a blend of virtual and in-person rounds, students will manage high-stakes negotiations while developing essential skills in negotiation, strategic thinking, and client representation. This comprehensive experience prepares participants to excel in transactional law, providing them with the expertise necessary to succeed at the intersection…

A law firm recently reached out to me to conduct a CLE on Mental Health Challenges in the Age of AI. It was an interesting request. I’ve spoken about AI issues on panels, as a keynote speaker, and in the classroom, and I wrote about it for Tennessee Journal of Business Law. I also conduct workshops and CLEs on mental health in the profession. But I’ve never been asked to combine the topics. 

Before I discussed issues related to anxiety about job disruption and how cognitive overload affects the brain, I spent time talking about the various tools that are out there and how much our profession will transform in the very near future.

If you’re like many lawyers I know, you think that AI is more hype than substance. So I’ll share the information I shared with the law firm.

According to a  2024 Bloomberg survey on AI and the legal profession, 69% of Bloomberg survey respondents believe generative AI can be used ethically in legal practice. But they harbor “extreme” or “moderate” concerns about deep fakes (e.g., human impersonations, hallucinations and accuracy of AI-generated text,  privacy, algorithmic bias, IP, and of course, job displacement.

Those are…

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…

I’ve been thinking about environmental, social, and governance issues (“ESG”) for almost twenty years — long before they became mainstream. As an in-house lawyer at a public company prior to joining academia, I had no choice. I teach, research, and consult on these issues now and have a whole lot of thoughts about them, which I'll share in coming posts. 

I had the honor of presenting on "ESG and India in 2022" yesterday. ESG is a hot topic in India, as it is everywhere – – I have either attended or spoken on half a dozen panels on ESG this year to introduce the topic to lawyers. If you're not familiar with the term or think it's completely irrelevant to what you do for a living, here are some common classifications for investors that integrate ESG into their portfolio selection and investment process. 

Environmental: climate change, water, alternative energy, pollution & waste management

Social: human rights, workplace standards, worker health safety, diversity & equal opportunity, labor relations, land grabs

Governance: bribery & corruption, board diversity, corporate political contributions, executive compensation, disclosure & transparency, board independence, tax avoidance

If you're a transactional lawyer, chances are you or your clients…

It's been one year since the US declared a pandemic. It's been a stressful time for everyone, but this post will focus on lawyers.

I haven't posted any substantive legal content on LinkedIn in weeks because so many of my woo woo, motivational posts have been resonating with my contacts. They've shared the posts, and lawyers from around the world have reached out to me thanking me for sharing positive, inspirational messages. I hope that this care and compassion in the (my) legal community will continue once people return back to the office.

Earlier this week, I took a chance and posted about a particularly dark period in my life. I've now received several requests to connect and to speak to legal groups and law firms about mindset, wellness, resilience, and stress management. I've heard from executives that I used to work with 15 years ago asking to reconnect. Others have publicly or privately shared their own struggles with mental health or depression. I'm attaching a link to the video here. Warning- it addresses suicide prevention, but it may help someone. 

I'm also sharing an article that my colleague Jarrod Reich wrote last year. He and I have just finished…

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…