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the progression of the system at
Diego Portales University School
of Law followed by a tour of
the Villa Grimaldi Torture Center
in Santiago. This complex
was used to torture political
prisoners during Augusto Pinochetʼs
rule. The students spent
the rest of their trip learning
about reforms to the system that
have led to Chileʼs stability and
free trade agreements.
Markussen, who frequently
starts her day with a 5 a.m. conference
call with Hong Kong and
ends her day at 10 p.m. talking to
colleagues in Australia, expected
the wide variety of activities to
provide the students with a better
understanding of their world.
SEEING THE SIMILARITIES
“I hope the students feel a
sense of connectedness with people
in other parts of the world.
They saw another culture. They
met people that they see similarities
with that they can learn from,”
she said. “I think itʼs important
for the future of the world, generally,
for people to understand each
other and figure out how they can
work together and support each
other and have empathy and sympathy
for each other and for how
each other lives.”
Markussen has spent the
majority of her career building
her global view of business and
law. Having practiced business
in Europe for years, Markussen
first became interested in
Chile after negotiating with joint
venture partners in the Latin
American country for MetLife.
She said she was impressed
by the law firms there, and she
found the businesspeople to be
very sophisticated.
“Thereʼs no other part of the
company or no other type of law
Iʼd rather practice because of all
the variations and the challenges
of working in all these cultures,”
Markussen said. ■
Business Top Attorneys Teach Drafting
Law students at the Levin College
of Law are getting a taste of the life that
awaits them at corporate law offices
thanks to a new business document
drafting course taught by top attorneys
who travel to Gainesville to teach the
innovative class.
The course was developed by
Professor Stuart Cohn and Miami
attorney Daniel H. Aronson, co-chair
of the Corporate & Securities Group at
Bilzin Sumberg Baena Price & Axelrod
in Miami.
With support from UF Law Dean
Robert Jerry, Cohn and Aronson enlisted
three prominent business lawyers
as adjunct professors: Lou Conti, a
partner with Holland & Knight who
splits his time between Orlando and
Tampa; Gardner Davis, a partner in the
Jacksonville office of Foley & Lardner;
and Gregory C. Yadley, a partner in
the Tampa office of Shumaker, Loop
& Kendrick and co-chair of the firm’s
Corporate Practice Group.
UNIQUE PROGRAM
“There are very few law schools
that offer anything like this,” Aronson
explained. “There was no real precedent
for what we wanted to do. We knew
Georgetown and NYU offered skillsfocused
courses, but no other law
schools offered anything close. While
I applaud the administration and
our adjunct professors, the heroes
here are the 20 students who went
through a brand new course, four
different professors, and a ton of work
to understand and draft corporate and
transactional documents that corporate,
securities and M&A attorneys deal with
every day.”
The two-credit course went well
beyond issues of how best to draft
a document, Cohn said. The course
addressed negotiation and transaction
skills, and writing assignments included
drafting letters of intent, employment
agreements and representations and
warranties in a merger agreement,
among other documents.
“The students very much
appreciated seeing top attorneys
come in and talk about their practice
experiences,” Cohn said. “This wasn’t
a class with a lot of war stories. It
was an opportunity to hear highly
experienced attorneys talk about reallife
drafting issues, practical solutions
to those issues and real-life situations
in terms of dealing with clients, finding
out exactly what clients have in mind,
and negotiating differences between
competing interests.”
Most of the students were in
their third year and plan to pursue a
corporate and/or transactional practice.
“Most of the classes are microcosms
of the experiences, skills and tools that
corporate law partners and supervisors
endeavor—often on an ad hoc basis
—to transmit to junior associates
and attorneys early in their careers,”
Aronson said.
Feedback from the course has been
very positive, and plans are underway
for development of additional skillsbased
offerings in the business law
curriculum, including in the areas of
mergers & acquisitions and advanced
corporate finance. Aronson said the
course should allow students to “hit the
ground running” after graduation and
thus should make them more attractive
at both law firms and corporate law
departments.
Conti, who knew Cohn through their
work on a number of legislative drafting
projects for The Florida Bar, said the
students displayed surprisingly good
drafting skills throughout the course.
SOLID EXPERIENCE
“Most of the young associates in
our office keep saying they wish they
had something like this when they
were in law school, because when you
come into practice you literally do not
know where to start in many cases,
particularly in a transactional practice,”
said Conti, who previously taught as
an adjunct at Widener University and
Temple University.
It’s easy to look at form documents
and see what somebody else has
done before, Conti explained, but it
takes experience to understand why
provisions are there or not there, and
how to negotiate the relative tweaking
of those provisions. Without a senior
lawyer to mentor them and take the
time to sit down and explain a lot of the
drafting and language issues, he said,
young associates typically have to learn
business document drafting on “a catchas-catch-can
basis.”
—By James Hellegaard
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