Earlier this month, Professor Stephen Sepinuck gave a presentation entitled Teaching Contract Drafting Through Form Annotation at Emory University’s biennial conference on teaching transactional skills. The presentation highlights Sepinuck’s growing prominence in the teaching of transactional skills, which he has been doing for numerous years at Gonzaga.
Building Bridges Between Practitioners and Students
After two years, The Transactional Lawyer newsletter is going stronger than ever. Released on the first day of every other month, this electronic newsletter is distributed free of charge to over 1,000 lawyers in the United States and Canada. The newsletter includes articles by faculty, students, and transactional attorneys and brief descriptions of recent cases relevant to transactional practice.
“The newsletter helps bridge the gap between academia and practicing lawyers on both sides,” explains Sepinuck. “For lawyers, it provides timely and practical advice, things they are unlikely to find in a typical law review article. For the student authors, they learn what is important to both transactional attorneys and transactional practice.”
Creating Effective Transactional Instruction
In response to a growing demand to make sure their graduates are practice-ready, law schools around the country are working to add transactional skills to their curricula. Gonzaga Law has a required course in each of the first two years of legal study since launching the new curriculum in 2009. Drawing from this experience, Professor Sepinuck, as director of the Commercial Law Center, is launching a program to offer advice, assistance, and materials to any law school contemplating new courses or other instructional units on transactional skills. For more information, contact the Commercial Law Center.
