Negotiation Success - Entire Series

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Ninety percent or more of cases settle, yet lawyers are predominantly trained to do battle over facts and law. And while legal analysis certainly plays a key role in settling cases, achieving best results in negotiation also involves a variety of personal and process skills that bring greater success and fulfillment to the process and help lawyers best satisfy their ethical and professional obligations.

This five part series will provide lawyers with tools and techniques to improve how they negotiate after they complete the appropriate legal framework. By drawing from several disciplines—strategic planning, mediation, facilitation, leadership psychology and philosophy—the series presents a unique method for building agreement based on increased empathy, information, and structure.

Beginning with Aristotle’s empathic framework (ethos, pathos and logos), and paradoxically matching a highly structured dialog process, lawyers will learn how to systematically:

• Adapt their own negotiation style to better fit the people and situation;
• Build broad mutual understanding of each others positions;
• Generate more information and ideas;
• Design detailed agendas followed by all participants;
• Exchange proposals that stimulate creative analysis and commitment.

By applying the full model or finding ways to implement individual themes and tactics, lawyers will learn how to better engage and understand the other side to a negotiation—thereby increasing the professionalism and creativity so essential to the successful agreement in complex legal matters.

Most lawyers devote the lion’s share of negotiation planning to marshalling facts and building arguments. Encouraged by a culture of oppositional negotiation, it is easy to become entrenched in our positions. As a result, any proposal that appears counter to our positions is regarded as threatening to success. This course introduces an expansive negotiation style which increases our aptitude for persuasion, while reducing defensiveness and aggressive behavior on both sides of the table.

• Gain maximum leverage in negotiation.
• Reduce defensiveness.
• Establish incremental agreements along the path to resolution.

Preparation is one of the most important aspects of long-term negotiation success. This program examines two aspects of negotiation preparation and a highly effective model for creating a map of needs and interests in order to increase influence and cooperation in negotiation.

• Learn to identify both party’s real needs and interests.
• Foster an environment of cooperation.
• Reduce negotiation risk with reference points for success.

Much of our society embraces a “win-lose” negotiation model that encourages lawyers to distance themselves from the other side of the table. This program examines the diminishing returns in the “win-lose” approach, and examines methods for expanding the pie, finding common ground and uncovering creative solutions for getting more needs met.

• Minimize the polarizing effects of legal arguments.
• Engage clients and other counsel in creative discourse.
• Learn an approach to expanding the size of the pie.

In this section, lawyers learn to develop a range of proposals that address the majority of the needs of both sides, and then discuss a range of negotiation strategies to achieve satisfactory resolutions. The goal of this program is to leave lawyers with strategies for structuring negotiation in a way which ensures that challenging conditions do not derail the process.

• Identify and establish ground rules to withstand the stress of difficult negotiation.
• Develop and deliver proposals without invoking defensiveness.
• Close deals that meet more client objectives.

There are times when we are forced to engage with individuals who we perceive as difficult. Often they employ strategies, threatening behavior, and an uncooperative working style as a means to achieve their objectives. While these instances are challenging, if we are committed to our objectives, we can still be effective negotiators by winning their willingness to cooperate. Lawyers learn to minimize the damage of tactical negotiation, refrain from emotional responses to hardball tactics, and identify opportunities for understanding.

• Apply leverage without resorting to the force that damages relationships.
• Transform aggressive lawyers into productive negotiators.
• Convert hardball tactics into opportunities for understanding, relationship-building and productive dialog.