Negotiation Law Blog

I just spent the weekend with a group of incredibly engaged, brilliant and successful women lawyers at the Vail Sebastian Hotel where I keynoted the annual Conference of the Colorado Womens Bar Association.

Four questions stirred the greatest interest.

1. What are your super powers to get things done?
2. Do you have (or need) the authority to use them?
3. What can you use them to accomplish to further your own career?
4. If you're not using them, why not?

Last night at the cocktail party after my presentation (slideshow below) dozens of women approached me to tell me what their "super powers" were.

• Institutional Knowledge.
• Ability to assign work.
• Persuasiveness.
• Influence over firm power brokers.
• Willingness to study for and take foreign bar exams (a recurring nightmare in my book, but hey! "how is the firm recompensing you to study for and take it?")
• Ability to promote younger lawyers.
• Ability to form relationships with the firm's clients.
• Speaking ability.
• Writing ability.
• Ability to: take a great deposition, write jury instructions, try a case.
• A large social-professional network that can be tapped for favors and referrals.

And on and on and on.

If you have not made a list of your "super powers" please do so now. Ask yourself how they can benefit your career. Then ask yourself whether you're using them effectively to do so and if not, why not. 

Then go and prosper!

First off I just love the name.  

National Girlfriends Networking Day is a nationwide celebration of making connections.  Events take place around the country on June 4th [live streaming] three amazing women; Lesley Jane Seyour the editor of MORE magazine, Taj Williams-Franklin a WNBA coach, player and community activist and Soledad O'Brien Emmy award winning journalist.  [They] will be taking questions through social media from nationwide participants. 

Read on here and sign up today!

The live-streaming events are free!

This is what feminist heaven looks like.

Do we have to be this successful to rearrange the world to fit one woman's life? Or could we simply realize that this is what WorkLife looks like on the day it stops being a man's world.

Scandal's show-runner Sonda Rhimes' executive-Mommy day.

As part of her Shondaland production company, Rhimes oversees some 550 actors, writers, crew members and producers, and her days are optimized to do so. In the morning, she gets her older daughter, Harper, who is 10, off to school and then contends with whatever is most urgent: writing, giving notes on a script and watching casting videos. The televisions in her office and home are connected to a system that allows her to watch real-time editing by her editors. Both of her daughters have rooms across the hall from her office at work. The younger, a perfectly chubby-cheeked 1-year-old named Emerson, comes in every day, clambering onto Rhimes’s lap during meetings.

I'm not blaming the guys when I say that the historic accident of the modern workplace wouldn't have required men to choose between work and family. They would long ago have figured out how to have both.

Oh, wait a minute. They did. It was called "wives."

In today's economy, few men have the luxury of "wives" and even fewer working mothers have the luxury of the services wives and mothers of an earlier era provided - 24-hour child, husband and extended-family care.

According the government statistics, fifty-nine percent of all married mothers work and 67% of all single women (including those widowed and divorced) work.

Let's celebrate Mothers Day by reimagining the future of WorkLife for everyone's benefit, shall we?

Now more than ever.

Mediation Awareness Week. See the televised event by clicking on the image and begin at the 57-minute mark.

Ten Reasons To Negotiate Resolution

1. The Los Angeles Superior Court has closed four court houses and dozens of court rooms. 

2. Time is literally money (see the time value of money).

3. The law (and your lawyer) only care about relevant facts - the most important part of your dispute may well not even be addressed, let alone resolved, by a jury verdict in your favor.

4. As your trial date nears, everyone - the judge, your lawyer, their lawyer, your spouse, your friends, and random acquaintances will urge you to negotiate a resolution with a neutral third party (a mediator).

5. Your attorney settles 90% of every case s/he litigates. S/he rarely goes to trial anymore. Ask her about the last verdict she won and then the one before that. If you have a skill (piano, golf, cooking a souffle) ask yourself how well you'd perform if you haven't used that skill recently or often.

6. Litigation is an extremely expensive board game, much of which is simply the cat and mouse exercise of discovery. Here's how it's played. I ask for documents. You object. I write you a letter demanding compliance. You write back refusing to comply and reminding me I have to "meet and confer" with you before we ask the discovery referee to intervene. We meet. We accomplish nothing. I make a motion (write a "brief") to compel you to turn over documents. You write an opposition. I write a reply. We pay the discovery referee to read our papers and listen to our oral argument. The discovery referee splits the baby in half or fourths or tenths. One of us asks the Judge not to sign off on the discovery referee's decision. More papers, more writing, more time, more of your money. The Judge, not a lion of courage, splits the baby again and refuses to award either party the costs of forcing compliance. Two months later (at least six have now elapsed) you get a stack of documents and a privilege log listing the documents that aren't being provided. I write you a letter demanding that you turn over documents on the privilege log. Rinse. Repeat.

7. As if the disrespect of the original dispute were not enough, I now get to sit you down in a conference room with a court reporter and spend a day or two asking you questions you don't want to answer. Often, the questions are asked in a disrespectful manner. When you complain to your attorney, he says "that's just the way the game is played." Focus on the word game. Are you having fun yet?

8. You get a bill for legal services rendered every month but you're no closer to resolution after receiving and paying 12 of these than you were on day one.

9. You're a business person. You negotiate business deals every day. Your lawyer does not.

10. You have given away any power you might once have possessed to resolve this dispute to a lawyer who does not understand your business, your life or the facts that drove you to seek legal advice in the first place.

Had enough? There are people out there - mediators - who are specially trained in helping you first communicate with your attorney and then helping you negotiate the resolution of your dispute with the "other side." Choose carefully. There are as many bad mediators there as there are litigators. My best advice? Negotiate the resolution of the dispute yourself even if it requires you to swallow your pride and to be the first one to say, "let's sit down and figure out how best to serve your interests and mine at the same time."

Nearly every law student in the country from the oldest grad to the youngest aspirant, learns the meaning of "intent" in civil law from the case of Garratt v. Dailey.

You may not want to hurt Bill, but if you put an apple on his head, raise your shotgun and pull the trigger, the law will say you intended to kill him in the highly likely event that your William Tell act causes Bill's death.

The rule that Garratt applies to a five-year old's decision to pull out the chair out an adult woman is about to sit in is this - if the defendant knows with a substantial certainty that his act will result in harm, he must be presumed to have intended it.

Which takes us directly to law firm women's initatives. As the National Association of Women Lawyers' 2012 survey of BigLaw women's initiatives concluded, the programing offered by BigLaw to retain and promote women does not achieve its goals. Not only that, but these women's initiatives rarely have measurable promotional goals.

As the Survey reports, even though women’s initiatives have been in effect for at least a decade, "what such initiatives actually do, and the impact they have on women in firms, is all too often not clear and at worst, open to criticism bordering on cynicism." More particularly,

fewer than half of all women’s initiatives are evaluated annually by management. Similarly, fewer than half of all women’ initiatives submit written evaluations. Moreover, it is not clear that the reporting and evaluation functions focus on specific goals. Some 40% of firms report no specific criteria at all for their evaluation. Of those who report goal-related evaluation criteria, there is often no connection to concrete advancement criteria. Thus, descriptions of evaluation criteria were often along the lines of “accomplishment of goals and activities identified at the start of each year” or “number of events, quality of events, participation level.”

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