Negotiation Strategies for Commercial Lawyers

Introduction

Negotiation has always been the one of the most important lawyer's skills both for commercial deals and for disputes. Now it needs essential honing in the new environment as more disputes are settled or decided by mediation/arbitration and many go to on-line dispute resolution.

• What is the lawyer's role in these new contexts?
• How best can we keep control of alternative dispute resolution proceedings?
• How will the ethics of negotiation change after the new Solicitors' Code of Conduct, revelations in the Leveson hearings and the long term effects of advice to the banks before the crash?

What You Will Learn

This participatory workshop involves a number of worked exercises as well as sessions covering:

• Preparing for Negotiation: The Stages
• Preparation, position, confrontation/getting to know you, Horse Trading, precipitation of crisis, confirmation
• The Strategy Skills of Negotiation
• Traditional (adversarial) and the Zero-Sum Game, principled, expanding the pie, problem solving, looking at needs, positional bargaining; playing the game and changing the game
• Mediation, ADR and Electronic deals
• Mediators' assumptions, lawyers' assumptions, clients' assumptions, expense, continuing relationships and outcomes, the form of mediation, consider arbitration, electronic table platforms
• The Reluctant Negotiator
• Getting them to the table - one text negotiation systems, drafting the contract, Getting going - multi issue negotiation, moving from threshold agreement, pareto optimality and the efficient frontier
• The new ethics of negotiation
• Conflicts and entities, duty to the client, duty to the court and duty to the public interest