Contracts, Career Growth & Entrepreneurship with Laura Frederick

Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Studying Law Around the World. Today I have the opportunity to be interviewing Laura Frederick. You might have seen her posts in the past about contracts on LinkedIn. She's a professional with immense experience in this area. She's been in different firms in big law, at Tesla, and so many other things that we'll be speaking about during today's podcast. But thank you so much for accepting the invitation, Laura. You're very welcome to the podcast. Thank you. No, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Thank you so much. Well, as I quickly mentioned, you've had an incredible career. as a law student now. I didn't mention this specifically, but beyond my first law career in Brazil, I transitioned over to Canada and I'm working towards becoming a licensed lawyer here right now. And you've really worked at top law firms. You led contracts at Fortune 500 companies like Tesla, and now you run your own business. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. And I'm sure the audience would be very interested as well. Can you please share a little bit about your journey and maybe even what led you to start How to Contract? Yeah, no, I'd be happy to. And for your benefit and others who are just starting out, I'll tell you, when I came out of law school, I couldn't get a legal job to save my life. It was, I had, you know, good grades near the top of the class, but it was at a time when it was, there was a recession going on. And I graduated law school. I did a Fulbright grant for a year after. And then I went to thinking, you know, everybody's going to want to hire me. I'm awesome. I have great grades and credentials. And moved to D.C., Washington, D.C., and, you know, couldn't find anything. I ended up as a licensed attorney, meaning I'd already passed the bar. I was fully licensed. I worked in a call center with high school grads, college grads, you know, anybody, because that was the only job I could get for 4 months. And then the only legal job I could get after those 4 months was as a law clerk. So my title was officially law clerk for 9 months until they transitioned me into an attorney. attorney role. So I know we're hitting on hard times coming ahead already in a lot of places, and where you start doesn't determine where you finish is the big motto there. So I started kind of rough there. I couldn't get a job. The job I got was a small little firm, didn't pay much, but it was a legal job. And I did that and then ended up transitioning to a bigger firm and then ended up in— for about 3 years, I did franchise law. Because that was all I could get. And then I transitioned to technology transactions, and that's when I really fell in love with contracts and everything about doing deals, that those kinds of deals and that kind of work that led me to get hired by a big, big law, Morrison Foerster, a large global firm. Got the chance to live in Asia for a little while. I lived in— they had me in the Singapore office and the Hong Kong office for a time, and then I went in-house and then I was in-house for 14 years, including my last stint at Tesla. And then I moved. What I— there was something in me that felt something was needed. It was— I loved my job at Tesla. I worked with great people, exciting stuff, just really fulfilling for me. And but it's still— there was something missing. And I interviewed a couple other places. And I'm like, this is just a different thing with the same— it's just the same thing, but just in a different place. So I decided what I really wanted was to become my own boss and have that freedom. So I opened my own law firm and that did well. And then COVID hit and I'm trying— there's no way to promote law firms really then except on LinkedIn. So I did that, a challenge that said post every day for 30 days. And I didn't think I could do that. It was too much. I'd never really posted on LinkedIn before except a couple times a year. And I decided to try it and It was really amazing. It immediately found my community on LinkedIn, like-minded people who enjoyed nerding out on contracts. And then that led me to create How to Contract because there was such an interest and I saw that I could give back in a way that I would've wished I had the kind of access to this content when I was a newer lawyer and coming up learning contracts. I have all this knowledge I gained over the years and it was a great opportunity to share that. That's kind of the journey of how to contract. And eventually, about 2 years ago, I stopped practicing law and just do this full-time now because it was pretty hard to mix client work with this kind of work. For example, I was at one point right towards the end, right before I closed my firm, I was working on a $600 million equipment deal for a large energy storage project. And I'm just doing the equipment component, which was $600 million. And I have to say, I wanted to say that client, I'm like, sorry, I can't, you know, turn the markup on your major transaction because I have to post some social media clips, you know? And that's when I realized, I was like, I can't do— I could do both, but it's never going to be congruent. So I decided this was more of a calling for me than, you know, I could help a lot more people with the how-to-contract business than I could as an individual lawyer helping an individual client. So that's kind of how I ended up here. That's amazing. Well, that's so interesting to hear a little bit of, you know, how your love for contracts began. And you, you already have launched your book with 2 editions. You have a platform that offers trainings. You also have an in-person training, if I'm not wrong, yearly. So can you tell us just a little more about what How to Contract does these days? Yeah, we do a lot because that's— I love creating training. I love creating tools, anything I can do because I just love thinking and analyzing and explaining how contracts work and getting to the bottom of it all. So I do have, for example, I have an annual conference, although I'm moving to 2 times a year. I'm in the process of— I'm going to do one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast of the US. So that's called ContractsCon, and it's a different kind of training. We— all the speakers are top-notch, really high-end lawyers, so partners in law firms, general counsel, but they all have to wear costumes to speak and they adopt a character. So this past January, we had Sherlock Holmes, we had Merlin, you know, and some of them, we had Mary Poppins, and they stay in character for the whole training. It's so much fun. So that's the ContractsCon training. And then I do a ton of virtual training. And some of it's paid. I offer courses, on-demand courses, live courses. And then I also have collected all the videos and tools that I've created over the last 4 and a half years, and I put them in my membership library. And then I offer that as part of membership, you get a weekly lesson for 30 minutes that's on demand and you can, you know, read things and watch videos to help people kind of keep up their learning. And then, but I also do a ton of free stuff. I'd say 50% to 70% of what I do is free because, you know, I just, I feel a need or I want to help people and a lot of people can't afford training and need kind of ongoing free stuff. I know for a long time I didn't have any budget for training from my company, so I had to pay for my own training. And it's just, it's so important. So I tried to keep it at an affordable rate compared to what you get for everything and really try and serve the community. So right now I've got a free Friday webinar, well, training series, I guess is what it's called. It's called AI Contracts Explained. And it's a weekly series where I bring in experts on AI contracting to discuss how to draft contract provisions, how to advise your clients on what— when they purchase AI products, that sort of thing. Because I'm not an AI expert. I don't have that expertise. I'm trying to learn. So I figured, you know, I could get all these great lawyers who already know it to explain it to me. And we record it and we share it every week. So you can find more on my LinkedIn page. Fantastic. I'll make sure to add it to the show notes as well. So for those of you listening, you can just scroll down here on the show notes and find the links as well. And you just mentioned how you started posting during COVID your 30-day challenge, and how you immediately found your community. So I was wondering, did you ever expect it to take off? And also maybe like, what was the first moment that you really realized like, wow, this is really working. This is really something that, you know, I should invest more time and effort in. Yeah, no, I don't think I ever expected it to take off, especially not as it has been or has as it has. So when I started, it was, you know, I didn't expect to find the community. I hadn't really posted online. I didn't know what that was. I had the idea of doing some training in the future because it was something that I really enjoyed doing when I was in-house. But I don't know that I expected to be able to earn a living off of it, especially one that pays more than being a lawyer. I never would've expected that, but that's I've been very blessed that way. It's been very interesting, especially the notoriety or, you know, LinkedIn famous, as they say. It's really bizarre because I've never been the one who wanted to be the center of attention. So, you know, I'm thrilled when I can stand to the side and let other people take the center, you know, take the focus. But with this, I learned that I had to do that. I had to stand up more. When it was— people started to recognize me, I go to events and I had one woman even like follow me into the bathroom to talk to me and hug me. And I find a lot of people do that because I'm very transparent and share a lot about not just contracts, but about my life experience, the lessons I've learned, things like that. I think people really feel they know me and they I really do. Like, how I am on LinkedIn is exactly how I am in person. So there's a lot of familiarity when I talk to people. So that's probably the most unexpected and very welcome. I'm thrilled to have all these friends around the world who, you know, I've kind of skipped that awkward initial discussion to get to that level because they see me every day. That's incredible. Considering all the career you've built and You know, I got the chance to listen to quite a few podcasts or interviews that you've been on over the years. I always found it impressive that you always also, you know, mentioned family, your children and all of that. And that's always so appreciated. But on the, on the career component of it, I was wondering if you could go back and give yourself some kind of advice to your younger self, or, you know, even maybe to your children if they were to go into law school now. What would you tell them? I think I'd tell them to let go of the fear. Fear is what I see looking back is I let fear drive so much of my achievement. And I was so afraid all the time of, oh my God, if I don't get the right grades, I won't be able to get the job. And then I get the job. If I don't work a massive amount of hours, I'm going to get fired. If I don't figure this out, I'm going to get fired. You know, I always had these ideas of The world is ending. The world is ending. And in ways that fear is useful and to an extent, but at least for me, I had so many different points where I was achieving so much, but I, I kept the fear as I was achieving instead of focusing on the joy. So I think what I tell myself is things play out and they play out as they should, at least that's my belief. And as they're supposed to, and that there's not one path for us. There's lots of different paths. And anytime you hit an obstacle, it's just redirecting you. to something else. It's not worse. It's not better. It's just something different. And we have these lessons in each obstacle. So I think just kind of telling myself to just calm down a little bit. I don't know if that's the right way to say it, but it's just sort of relax some about the achievements, the fear, the being so driven all the time. I think I learned that all through school, and I continued it in my career. But in a lot of ways, I wonder if I would have been more successful if I had been able to just sit back and enjoy it a little bit more. Not more successful, that's not the right word, but I think it would have been— it would have been better. It would have been a better experience for me if I could enjoy the moments more and let go of some of the stress. I think I would have been equally successful because once you build that foundation, And I already had the goals and the skills, I could have just been on a great trajectory and enjoyed it. But instead I was just always so scared. So I guess that's my advice. That's amazing. I've recently been in a project. So my university, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, they're turning 75 during this school year. And I've actually been interviewing 75 alumni, getting to hear about their story and a piece of advice that they have for the next generation of lawyers. And I've just enjoyed so much, you know, listening to that. And, you know, somewhat repeatedly where lawyers will say, I was so scared of not landing the big law job. I was so scared of this or that, that maybe I didn't take the courses I was interested in taking in school because I just wanted to make sure that my resume, my transcripts really looked like very focused on this or that. And then I started on this area and then today, 30 years later, They are very successful in what they consider successful, be it, you know, family balance, be it already being retired, all kinds of things. But I really appreciate that piece of advice. Thank you so much. And moving on a little bit about learning about your experience, you're a lawyer turned entrepreneur in a way, and I've got to hear a few of your insights in other podcasts as well. But I'd love to hear what's something that people don't realize about running a training business on the background, right? So any fun or unexpected moments along the way? I know you just mentioned, you know, people following you into the washroom, but are there, are there some other things that, that you realized, you know, once you were into it? Yeah, I think the thing I don't think I appreciated was how much there's a lot of monotony when you're running a business. You know, it's a little bit different when you're practicing law, at least the kind of work I was doing. No, no one day was the same as the next. There was always Changing, we had different counterparties, we had different deals. It was just always different with your business. The day-to-day work of running the business is very, very similar to every single day or on a weekly basis what you have to get done. So I think that I don't think I appreciate how much of that work being an entrepreneur would take. But I love that I don't have a boss. I love that I can work as hard as I want when I want to make more money, when I want to push more programs. But then I can take time, work less, and I'm in control of that. So that's the part I think that I really like is normally we all have ups and downs in workflow, but I'm really in control of what I do. But that's also the downside is I'm in control of it. So when I do slack off and take some time off, you know, the income drops as opposed to being an employee where you take a vacation or two. You're still getting the same pay. So it's, it's a double-edged sword in the sense of create my income, but I also like, I create my income, I guess that's. And so I have to create it and it's not just set in passive money that's coming in every month. It's, I have to continue to work for it, but I love it. I can, I can't imagine retiring. I can't imagine doing anything that would be more fun than what I get to do now. That's amazing. So, you mentioned you were coming up with, you know, 2 conferences a year. You've already trained thousands of lawyers and professionals, written a bestselling book, and built this really thriving ecosystem with so many people in it. And I'm wondering, what's the next big goal for you with How to Contract? You know, I was thinking about that, and I've been so achievement-oriented for so long, and I have done that even without a contract. I'm like, I gotta get bigger. Okay. What can I do more? And I realized this past year, I was like, you know what? I don't need to grow bigger. And before I was like, I gotta big and go big. I gotta scale so I can sell the business and I can make all my money. And then I realized it's like, I don't know that I wanna do that because what I've got is about as good as in my mind as I can get it. And why would I sell that? Why would I walk away? Why would I retire? I mean, at some point it might not be as fun as it is now, but But I also realized I don't need to build big things. So I'm going to try my— the next thing is actually staying steady and just kind of keep life in balance, keep doing new programs that serve the current need, which is why I started doing the AI contract training and enjoy myself and enjoy, you know, this life and all the people that are in my community and engage with them and serve them. Well, that's really fantastic. So happy to hear, you know, when people find a way to align, you know, their, their life goals with their values and all of that. So that's really incredible. And, you know, in a way, it really is all the free material you put out there. It really is in a way like a pro bono for the, for the legal society. So that's incredible. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to answering my questions today and to sharing a little bit more about Laura as a person, as well as an entrepreneur, as a lawyer. But I really appreciate the opportunity to get to know you a little better. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And thank you all for tuning into this episode. Please again, take a look at the show notes below and go follow Laura if you don't yet. Go learn about her material, her book, and her trainings. See you guys on the next episode.