On the Road Again
Last week I traveled to Helsinki to do a Drafting Clearer Contracts presentation for a Finnish company.
This was my first in-person presentation outside the United States since late 2019, when I did a memorable presentation in Seoul that I describe in this blog post. That was the culmination of several years of traveling the world like a maniac. (Go here for my 27 other “Notes from the Road” blog posts.) As I describe in this blog post from the same period, I had become inordinately invested in my Delta SkyMiles account.
In that blog post, I say, “I can’t imagine traveling in 2020 as much as I did in 2019.” That’s how it played out, but in a way I could never have expected. The pandemic happened, and the world discovered Zoom, so I’ve spent most of the past five years in my Long Island home office.
I’ve adjusted to the online world, so it would be churlish of me to complain. And I now have responsibilities I didn’t have during my years of peak travel, namely a job and a dog, Enzo. But there’s something about in-person presentations that it’s hard to capture online, as I explain in this 2024 blog post (featuring a photo of Enzo).
So it’s been gratifying that organizations have again started asking me to do in-person presentations. One result was last week’s trip.
Returning to Finland
I had been to Finland before. Somehow, ten years ago my brother Charles found himself the US ambassador to Finland. That made for a memorable visit I describe in this 2016 blog post. I end that post by saying, “I hope I have the opportunity to visit again.” So when the opportunity arose, I wasn’t about to turn it down.
After a day and a half to adjust to the time difference—I spent most of that time working in my Helsinki hotel room—I joined a group of participants in taking a car from the hotel to the company’s training facility. It’s in an estate outside of town, featuring boreal forests and a stretch of Baltic shore. (I won’t identify the company—not because that detail is sensitive but because it’s unnecessary.)
The setting was idyllic. That’s not just due to the company’s stewardship of their property; it’s also, as far as I can tell, a testament to a certain Nordic sensibility.
The Presentation
But I wasn’t there as a tourist. Instead, I was there to suggest to the participants that traditional contract language is dysfunctional—that we can do better. It’s a story I tell everywhere I go. No matter where people work with contracts in English, they all face the same problems.
I’ve learned that groups can react to a presentation in many different ways, and usually I won’t know how a group will react until I’m well into a presentation. Any group is made up of individuals, each of whom will to some degree differ from the others in terms of background, experiences, and temperament, making generalization an uncertain proposition. But I’ve found that a few participants can set the tone for a presentation. For example, the participants in my recent online public presentation for the Singapore Academy of Law were all off video and muted, but a handful of them got into the swing of banging out in chat answers to my questions. That made the presentation unexpectedly fun.
As for last week’s group of 30-plus participants, most of them were Finns, but they included people who had flown in from various parts of the world for what would be a two-day event. Overall, this group was on the quieter side. That’s in keeping with the general reputation of Finns, and in conversation over lunch, some participants said as much. But I also got the sense that they were quietly absorbing what I had to say.
By way of context, I encounter many quieter groups in different parts of the world—what I have to say comes as news to many, and it has its complexity, so it’s natural that people would start by thinking before speaking.
What I get out of a presentation is beside the point. But I enjoyed speaking with a participant who, in addition to receiving one of the copies of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting I had lugged with me to Helsinki, fished out of a bag their own personal copy, saying how they had long been a big fan of my stuff.
A Sense of Place
In my trips to give presentations, I try to get a sense of place. For example, by going for a run—it might be around Sydney Opera House or along the banks of the Chattahoochee River. Or going to a favorite ramen joint in Tokyo. Or joining a couple of participants and their friends for dinner in a Kuala Lumpur mall.
After last week’s presentation, three participants were kind enough to chaperone me in two sessions in the sauna, broken up by a plunge in the chilly Baltic. A sense of place? Mission accomplished.
And lunch, post-seminar sparkling wine on the verandah, and dinner all afforded the opportunity for engaging in conversation with participants, not to mention partaking in delicious locally-sourced food, tastefully presented.
For all that, my thanks to my Helsinki hosts.
Getting Out and About
It’s good for me to leave my home office once in a while. Just as meeting with people in person lets you assess their body language rather than just their head and the upper part of their torso, doing an in-person presentation offers more than the presentation itself. Those additional encounters help me get a sense of the broader context facing anyone who works with contracts, and they help me get a sense of participants as people, rather than as a box on a screen.
So I expect to continue doing in-person presentations. For one thing, I’m in preliminary discussions about doing public presentations in six Asian cities later this year. Stay tuned.
