Courses

We have been running courses on legal and contractual subjects for the last 20 years, and have taught many hundreds of practitioners.  Most of our courses have been run in the UK and Northern Europe.  A few have been further afield, including Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Australia.

Who are our courses for?

We have courses that are suitable for the following people:

• lawyers
• patent attorneys
• founders of technology-based business
• contracts managers and technology transfer executives
• support staff

What do our courses cover?

Most of our courses cover aspects of contract drafting, intellectual property or business transactions.  Some discuss general principles across different industry sectors, while others focus on a particular industry sector or activity, including:

• ICT transactions, eg software supply agreements
• Life science transactions, eg clinical trial agreements or licence agreements
• University research contracts
• Introduction to business law

It is unusual to see published reviews of a course, but if you are interested to read a detailed review of one of our courses by someone who attended it, see the link here.

Courses over the coming months

We will be running courses at UCL Faculty of Laws on the following subjects during the coming months (visit the UCL Laws website, under Events, for further information):

1. IP Licensing: An Advanced Level Workshop
2. Drafting and Negotiating IP Terms in Research Contracts
3. Drafting and Understanding Commercial Contracts: An Advanced Level Workshop
4. Drafting Legal Provisions in Commercial Contracts
5. Introduction to Contracts
6. Drafting and Understanding Contracts with Universities
7. IP Transactions: Law and Practice

As well as running our own courses, we run or speak on courses for other conference organisers.

We also run tailored and in-house courses several times each year, for companies, universities and NHS organisations, both in the UK and overseas. Please contact Mark (mark@andlaw.eu) for further details.

More detailed description

• IP Transactions course at UCL. About 15 years ago, Mark designed an in-depth training course for lawyers on the subject of IP transactions, and offered it to several, leading law faculties and a business school, initially without success.

In 2012, Sir Robin Jacob (who had recently become the IP professor at UCL after retiring from the Court of Appeal) agreed to take it on. It has now been running successfully at UCL for 6 years, convened by Mark Anderson and with approximately 30 volunteer speakers, who are mostly IP partners in leading law firms. Students come from all over the world to attend this unique course, which has won both a UCL Provost’s Teaching Award, and a Law Society Excellence Award (Highly Commended). The 5-day course is followed each year by a 2-hour exam, which he writes and marks. The student feedback from the 2018 outing of this course included the following comments:

“Fantastic course. The only course of this type – truly transactional law and practice. Genuine speakers who are still currently practising. Really enjoyed it. Well done, Mark and Sir Robin!”

 “Congratulations on running an excellent course, Mark. I thought you, and all of the guest lecturers, performed to a very high level. The quality of the materials was very impressive so thanks to everyone in support.”

•  Academic teaching. Mark has also taught undergraduate and postgraduate law students at UCL. For the last several years, at the request of the Dean of UCL Laws, he has co-run a 3-day course for LLM students, titled Transactional Skills Course.
• Professional training. Mark has provided IP and business law training for lawyers, licensing managers, and people starting high-tech businesses, at courses run in the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia, Continental Europe, Africa and Australia. In the last 5 years, he has moved most of his public courses to UCL. Contact: Lisa Penfold, UCL Laws.
• Training for government agencies and international bodies. Mark has run in-house courses for departments and agencies both in the UK (including the Ministry of Defence patents department, the Meteorological Office, and the UK IPO), and overseas (including the Norwegian IPO, Teagasc (Ireland), and SCIRO (Australia)). He was commissioned several times by the European Patent Office’s Patent Academy to write materials on IP licensing and delivered this training, in person and in webinars.
• Public debates. Mark has moderated public debates and panel discussions at UCL on modern contract drafting, with expert speakers including Lord Justice Flaux, former head of the Commercial Court, Kate Gibbons, a senior banking partner at Clifford Chance, and Ken Adams, US author of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting (ABA, 4^th edn). These can be viewed on YouTube.