In April, qLegal students presented two interactive workshops on commercial law as part of qLegal’s Public Legal Education programme. Both the audience and the student presenters learned a lot and enjoyed the experience.
When qLegal first started ten years ago, the majority of the public legal education workshops delivered by students were hosted at CCLS. With the expansion of the Public Legal Education programme over the years, qLegal shifted responsibility for hosting and marketing workshops, and also selecting the topic and the format, to our wonderful intermediary partners (incubators and other support organisations for entrepreneurs, sixth form colleges and university departments). For example, the workshops we have done for The Fore have been delivered only to clients of The Fore, and the topics and format have been chosen by staff of The Fore. And the workshop we deliver every year for students and faculty at Queen Mary’s Centre for Digital Music is the same.
This year, in addition to many workshops for our intermediary partners, we decided to present two workshops at CCLS, with topics selected from repeat questions asked by clients in our Legal Advisory programme and to an audience pulled from qLegal’s large pool of past and current clients and also our intermediary partners, as appropriate. We were pleased with the results and going forward will offer a mixture of workshops – some tailored to intermediary partners and their clients and some that we design for a broader audience and host ourselves.
The first workshop was “Protecting Your Intellectual Property When Working with Others” and the invitees were qLegal start-up clients, regardless of industry, and start-ups affiliated with Tower Hamlets, The students started with a basic introduction to intellectual property and then focused on how to register intellectual property, how to use non-disclosure agreements and how to include intellectual property clauses in contracts with independent contractors and employees.
The second workshop was aimed at creatives and sought to shed light on some of the harder to understand clauses in contracts. The goal was to explain the purpose of the clauses and give the audience practice and confidence reading sample clauses and spotting issues. The three types of clauses covered were intellectual property assignment clauses, limitation of liability provisions and force majeure clauses.
The qLegal students loved the experience and challenge of presenting to engaged audiences and did a wonderful job facilitating the many questions that came their way. The workshops were a good mixture of presentation by the students, engagement with the audience via planned, interactive exercises and open questions from the audience. The feedback from the audience included:
“The workshop was very well organised and gave clear definitions of legal terms - and some great examples. The resources shared (including presentation slides, sample documents and links to further resources) were a huge bonus and will, I'm sure, prove to be very useful. Thank you to all the team for all your hard work, advice and support!”
If you have an interest in learning more about our Public Legal Education workshops, please get in touch with us via qLegal@qmul.ac.uk.