The programme
Every redline your team sends will be answered.
One master services agreement runs through the whole morning, negotiated from both sides at the same time. Teams of four face each other across three simultaneous negotiations, with a fixed time for every round and advanced agentic tools under their instruction throughout. Everyone works at their own laptop, in an account provisioned before they arrive, and because the agreement is synthetic no client papers come into the room at any point.
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Registration and account access
There is a login card and a printed workbook at every seat, and the agreement is already sitting in your inbox. The first hour goes on getting Claude Code, the document packages and the Leela Works skills running on your own machine.
20 min
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The matter, and your instructions
You read a master services agreement for the supply of a software platform, along with a client brief that only your side of the room sees. The brief sets out what the business is trying to achieve, how much risk it will tolerate on liability and indemnities, and the point past which you are instructed to walk away. Three teams act for the customer and three for the supplier.
20 min
I
Review and opening redline
Your team reviews the draft and produces an issues list, citing each issue to the clause it arises from so that anybody can check it against the text. You then agree your positions and produce a redline: a marked-up Word document with the numbering intact and the cross-references still pointing where they should. When the seventy minutes are up, the redline goes to the other side, whether your team has finished or not.
70 min
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Interval
Coffee is served, and the counterparty’s markup arrives during the interval. Roles rotate inside each team, so whoever ran the review in the first round takes the drafting in the second. The sponsor is acknowledged here, and nowhere else in the programme.
15 min
II
The counterparty’s markup
The second round is worked against the counterparty’s markup, with less time than the first. The task is to find what has genuinely moved in their draft: the liability cap they halved, the carve-out they widened, the indemnity they quietly made mutual. Your team then has to answer each of those changes in drafting of its own. The same round teaches the practical uses of version comparison, and the repair of a document whose numbering somebody has broken.
55 min
III
Settlement
Each pair of teams either reaches agreement or records precisely where the negotiation broke down, and either outcome is worth having. Your team writes down what it conceded, what it held, and what holding those positions cost, because the next session is built from that record.
25 min
IV
The playbook
You turn the morning’s positions into a standing playbook: your preferred wording on each clause that mattered, the fallback you were prepared to accept, and the point at which you would walk. You then run the playbook against a second draft. Work that took your team seventy minutes at nine o’clock takes a few minutes by half past twelve.
35 min
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Debrief, and professional safeguards
The room compares outcomes: which terms moved in all three negotiations, which held everywhere, and where two teams working from the same brief ended up somewhere completely different. The programme closes on the professional questions: the audit trail, the citation of sources, and the proper handling of privileged and confidential material.
30 min
The room
There are twenty-four seats, six teams of four, and three negotiations running at the same time. Inside a team each person takes a role: one runs the review, one owns the positions, one does the drafting, one keeps the record. The roles rotate at the interval, so that by the time you leave you will have run the tools across every part of the agreement.
Nobody is acting. You are in-house counsel, you have been instructed by a client, and you are negotiating a contract; the only invented thing in the room is the agreement itself.
Both founders teach every edition and both are present throughout, one leading from the front while the other works the floor. The room is set with working tables rather than theatre rows.
There are no lectures on negotiation theory, no instruction in prompting, and no certificates.
Each room holds twenty-four lawyers, and requests close three days before the edition, or as soon as the seats are taken.