I am an A-2 and work in a two person team, along with the partner. I drafted an agreement which was extensively marked-up by the partner, although the agreement had all the right mechanisms in place. He's been very kind about it and hasn't made a fuss about it. But I feel bad that the partner had to put so much time into it. What can I do to improve my drafting ? What must the partner be thinking about me. Would really appreciate insights into the situation.

The fact that it's been extensively marked up without a fuss means that the partner knows you'll learn. You're expected to see the difference in what you've done and what he has and understand why one is preferred over the other - of there s a doubt, ask. This is how you'll learn and improve from this instance and apply the learnings going forward. Do this everytime you're faced with a new situation and you'll be absolutely fine.

It really depends. Some folks just like to mark-up agreements since they want / like the drafting to be exactly as they would drafted themselves, which is impossible since each person has their own drafting style. There are others who will only mark-up when there is an issue with the construct (but not otherwise), or in case they want to quickly get over with the document, in which case, they will often just prefer to copy and paste language from older agreements with which they are familiar rather than understanding the structure created by the junior colleague. If you know your partner well, then you should be able to guess which is the case. I also wouldn't hesitate to ask why revisions were made - the partner can give you feedback or assuage your concerns that nothing was wrong with the draft.

I worked with this one senior colleague / partner who would mark-up agreements even when I was 5/6 years into the profession and I knew very well that my drafts were perfectly fine to be shared with clients without review. Since he never said anything to me - I presumed that he wasn't unhappy with my drafting but he wanted me to draft like he would have himself drafted, which again, is impossible. His drafting style, which I still disagree with, is like the way I have drafted this response; that is, a stream-of-consciousness style which had complex sentence structuring, which if verbalised made perfect sense, but (I think) must be avoided in legal drafting. In my opinion, legal drafting must be devoid of personality and should follow the rules of formal logic, even if it doesn't sound organic when verbalised.