Today is Black Friday and with it, comes lots of shopping and negotiating for good buys. So... when is the best time to negotiate the best deal? Well, according to a study published about a month ago, people tend to be more honest and more ethical in the morning.A small [Read More]
Let us suppose that you are an attorney representing a client at a mediation. The following occurs:Your clients, the defendants, have told you that you are authorizedto pay $750,000 to settle the case. In settlement negotiations, after your offer of $650,000, the plaintiff's attorney asks "Are you authorized to settle [Read More]
Is eye contact a good thing or a bad thing? Some will answer by saying it depends upon the person's cultural background as Westerners value sustained eye contact while Middle Easterners and/or Asians will view it as inappropriate. Others will answer by saying it depends on which study is under [Read More]
On Sunday, October 13, 2013, I will be participating in a panel presentation entitled, "Ethical Duties of Eliminating Bias in the Legal Profession" as part of the California State Bar's Eighty Sixth Annual Meeting in San Jose, California. The focus of our discussion will be hidden/implicit biases-those biases that exist [Read More]
In 1999, Professors Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted a now well known study at Harvard University on distraction. As explained in a recent article on BBC Health News:Participants watched a video of two groups of people passing a basketball around - one group in black shirts, one group in [Read More]
If you have ever been in a dispute or in a conflict with someone (and who hasn't!), at some point, the "facts" of what allegedly happened are dissected. More often than not, there is disagreement about exactly what happened. It becomes a "he said, she said" argument in which credibility [Read More]
Recently, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School posted a blog by Katie Shonk discussing an April 25, 2013 article appearing in the Wall Street Journal written by Zack Anchors (entitled, Mind Mapping Streamlines A Business Negotiation.). In the blog, Ms. Shonk recounts Mr. Anchors' story about a financial [Read More]
I am a firm believer in the adage that one cannot convince someone to change her mind unless and until she is provided with new or different information. Thus, during the course of mediation, I am unable to change a party's view of the settlement value of a matter without [Read More]
