Southern California Arbitration Mediation and Conflict Resolution : Settle it Now Dispute Resolution Services : Serving Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Century City : Settle It Now Negotiation Blog

Need CLE Credits? Mark your calendars!

The American Bar Association Section of Litigation will hold a live teleconference and webcast on July 14, 2009 titled “Deal or No Deal: Improving the Odds of Successful Mediation.” Reinsurance and Insurance expert Katherine Billingham from KB ReSolutions, Inc. and Randall Kiser from DecisionSet will present at the event. Randall’s article Lets Not Make a Deal: An Empirical Study of Decision Making in Unsuccessful Settlement Negotiations was featured recently in the New York Times.

Donald R. Philbin, Jr., friend of this blog and adjunct professor at Pepperdine’s Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution will also speak at the event. Here are two excellent  papers written by Don:  The One Minute Manager Prepares for Mediation: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Negotiation Preparation published in the Harvard Negotiation Law Review and  Deal or No Deal? or Perhaps a Better Deal? The Impact of Improved Information published by CPR.

Find out more about the event here.

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According to Robert Wright in The Evolution of God (reviewed in todays NYT Book Review by Paul Bloom) "God has mellowed" from a capricious tyrant into non-zero-sum playing diety.  This is  good news for mediators and anyone else in search of a better paradigm for conflict resolution than the 16th century adversarial system.  As Bloom explains Wright:

When people see themselves in zero-sum relationship with other people — see their fortunes as inversely correlated with the fortunes of other people, see the dynamic as win-lose — they tend to find a scriptural basis for intolerance or belligerence.” The recipe for salvation, then, is to arrange the world so that its people find themselves (and think of themselves as) interconnected: “When they see the relationship as non-zero-sum — see their fortunes as positively correlated, see the potential for a win-win outcome — they’re more likely to find the tolerant and understanding side of their scriptures.” Change the world, and you change the God. For Wright, the next evolutionary step is for practitioners of Abrahamic faiths to give up their claim to distinctiveness, and then renounce the specialness of monotheism altogether. In fact, when it comes to expanding the circle of moral consideration, he argues, religions like Buddhism have sometimes “outperformed the Abrahamics.

Having just finished reading Wright's The Moral Animal (an evolutionary exploration for our tendency to reciprocal altruism)  and taking the long view of Western Civilization, I'm pre-disposed to believe that we have not only evolved physically and intellectually, but "morally" as well.

I understand from Bloom's review that Wright -- either a firm agnostic or wavering atheist -- is moved to wonder whether a universe in which moral progress takes place might suggest the presence of a higher power.  Quoting Wright, Bloom observes:

[Wright] emphasizes that he is not arguing that you need divine intervention to account for moral improvement, which can be explained by a “mercilessly scientific account” involving the biological evolution of the human mind and the game-theoretic nature of social interaction. But he wonders why the universe is so constituted that moral progress takes place. “If history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe — conceivably — the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.

Whatever the source of our moral development, divine or "mercilessly scientific," its encouraging on a bright summer Sunday to believe we can achieve, if not perfection, at least greater decency toward the divine in one another.

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When last we left Ari and Terrence negotiating Ari's compensation Terrence had ceremoniously offered Ari "NOTHING!!!"

But we're not talking only money here.  We're talking power and agency in the psychological sense, i.e., agency as the capacity to control one's own future.  Before the "nothing!!!" offer, Ari had told his wife he was still "afraid" of Terrence even as she attempted to prop him up by reminding him that he was Terrence's partner now.  Although Ari wants control of the agency,  his strength falters when Terrence comes back from a seven-year sabbatical. 

Ari's discomfort in the scene below is palpable.  Terrence asserts his authority ("I hope you're not planning to expense the Bat Mitzvah to the agency"); implies that Terrence's daughter had better instincts for talent at eight years old than Ari has now; and, previews his plan to take over Ari's five-year relationship with the talent of the hour -- Vincent Chase. 

Ari is dealing from a position of psychological if not actual weakness.  Having Terrence back on the scene is a little like going back home for the holidays after a few years at college.  You feel independent but it takes only a few minutes with your parents to revert to your powerless teenage self.  The final blow to Ari's self-esteem below is delivered in the form of a "gift."  $50,000 for Ari's daughter's Bat Mitzvah.  Ari is fifteen years old again.

Sensing Ari's weakness, Terrence moves to consolidate his power by taking over a staff meeting from which he excludes Ari.  But Terrence has over-played his hand.  Using Terrence's violation of the agency's folkways ("you embarrassed me in front of my troops") Ari pries an apology out of him and wins his first battle over who can summon the other's attendence by fiat.   

When Ari returns to the negotiations, he has re-set the bargaining table in a way Lax and Sebenius in 3-D Negotiation would applaud.  The subject of the negotiation is no longer Ari's share of the profits, but the value of the company itself and Ari's share in it.  Note how Ari takes credit for the lion's share of the company's present value and emphasizes the company's vulnerability if Ari leaves.

The deal is sealed but the check unwritten and Terrence has no intention of fulfilling his promise when he learns that Ari intends to open his own agency, (tortiously) raiding Terrence's shop of its agents and clients. In a remarkable power play, Terrence brings together the "five families" Hollywood, to threaten Ari with ruin if he so much as offers CAA's mail room boy a paid position. Quick on his feet, Ari accuses Terrence of anti-Semitism (making Terrence the member of an "out group") and then promises not to touch any agency's clients other than Terrence's.

With no money to open his new agency, Terrence's agents are not inclined to follow Ari until an unlikely partner offers to fund his venture, below.

As Lax and Sebenius instruct:

3-D Negotiation involves not one, but three dimensions, all of which are in play more or less concurrently throughout an[y] effective negotiation[:]  1. Tactics  2. Deal design 3. Setup.

Deal designs, say the authors, create lasting value.

Smart people working at the drawing board can . . . discover hidden sources of economic and noneconomic value, then craft agreements -- design deals -- that unlock that value of the parties involved.

In the Entourage negotiation, Ari unlocks his own value when he finds the courage to leave the safety of Terrence's agency and open his own.  By episode's end, Ari has changed the players, the subject matter of the negotiation and the balance of power in town.  This is 3-D negotiation at its finest (even though it also rolls out at its most shameless).

All of that said, don't miss the opportunity to appreciate Ari's "at the table tactics" in negotiating the sale of his interest to Terrence.  He enters the room confidently, refuses to permit Terrence to use his old power plays ("save a tree; say it out loud"); re-anchors Terrence's $4 million open with "my counter is $#@$ you"; explains his own value; diminishes any claim Terrence might have to the present value of the agency; signals his firm willingness to walk away; and, demonstrates his commitment to stay away in the absence of a realistic offer ("I have a rich wife who loves to spoil me").  The power shifts and the deal is done in two minutes flat.

Yes, it's Hollywood.  But all good fiction, which Entourage certainly is, rests on hard facts, all of which are brought vividly to life here.

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Does it ever serve a purpose?

One extremely good answer to the question whether an insulting first offer ever has a purpose can be found at Steve Mehta's Mediation Matters Blog Taking Escalates More than Giving.

In this example from Entourage, Terrence's insult is reciprocated by Ari in conflict escalation (as Steve predicts) and Ari's eventual victory as demonstrated by my longer post about this episode, Negotiation from a Position of Weakness, Hollywood-Style.

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Place: Glyptoteket, Copenhagen

Date: The 10th and 11th December 2009

During eleven days in December 2009 delegates from throughout the world will meet in Copenhagen for the 15th Conference of the Parties – COP15 – to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC. The Denmark meeting is crucial for the international climate change negotiations. The climate change crisis challenges people throughout the world to invent and implement innovative ways to mitigate and thwart climate changing causes and effects. The crisis calls for new methods for nations and people to overcome differences and work together with the objective of preventing and resolving conflict arising because of limited resources and/or the effects of climate change.

In a Manifesto from 9th July 1955 issued in London, Albert Einstein and other leading scientists urged humanity to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters based on new ways of thinking. An important new way of thinking features the use of the collaborative, participatory, and pluralistic conflict resolution processes like mediation and facilitation. Construction of a new global conflict prevention and resolution infrastructure is critical to a comprehensive international climate change policy. Such construction will be a major part of the Copenhagen Mediation Seminar, with discussions of conflict prevention and resolution. Our aim is to gather 100 mediators to create a new Manifesto showing the infrastructure to peaceful conflict resolution.

Please reserve this important seminar for 100 mediators attending from all parts of the world. More information will come shortly.

Gregg Walker, Tina Monberg, and Kenneth Cloke of Mediators Beyond Borders – Jens Emborg, Mie Marcussen, Lone Clausen, and Vibeke Vindelov of Nordic Mediators

During eleven days in December 2009 delegates from throughout the world will meet in Copenhagen for the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Denmark meeting is crucial for the international climate change negotiations. In December 2007 the parties to the UNFCCC agreed at Bali, Indonesia that negotiations on a future agreement have to be concluded at COP 15. The decision reflected the increased emphasis on the need for swift action made in the latest report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Bali delegates also recognized that 2009 would be a critical opportunity for an agreement before the commitments set in the Kyoto Protocol expire in 2012.

A Critical Issue

The International Crisis Group, one of the world’s leading independent, non-partisan conflict analysis advisory organizations, stresses that “a key challenge today is to better understand the relationship between climate change, environmental degradation and conflict and to effectively manage associated risks through appropriate conflict prevention and resolution mechanisms.” Conflict preventive measures and resolution mechanisms need to be part of the climate change negotiations, both in Copenhagen and beyond.

At the December 2007 United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia, the German Advisory Council on Climate Change presented a report, World in Transition – Climate Change as a Security Risk. Based on research into environmental conflicts, the causes of war, and climate impacts, the report states that climate changes could “overstretch many societies’ adaptive capacities within the coming decades. This could result in destabilization and violence, jeopardizing national and international security to a new degree.”

Drawing on the work of international experts and organizations including the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), the report notes, though, that “climate change could also unite the international community, provided that it recognizes climate change as a threat to humankind” and adopts “a dynamic and globally coordinated climate policy.” If the international community “fails to do so,” the report emphasizes, “climate change will draw ever-deeper lines of division and conflict in international relations, triggering numerous conflicts between and within countries over the distribution of resources, especially water and land, over the management of migration, or over compensation payments between the countries mainly responsible for climate change and those countries most affected by its destructive effects.” In its introduction to the report, the UNEP website states that “combating climate change will be a central peace policy of the 21st century.” Conflict preventive measures and resolution mechanisms should be part of the climate change negotiations, both in Copenhagen and beyond.

Scientists See the Need


In addition, the scientific community recognizes that global climate change issues challenge our ability to deal with a changing environment containing huge potential for conflict. In March 2009 over 2500 delegates from nearly 80 countries participated in the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions in Copenhagen, Denmark. At the end of the conference the delegates presented a set of key messages that included cautions about conflict and climate change.

Key Message 2: Social Disruption stated that “recent observations show that societies are highly vulnerable to even modest levels of climate change, with poor nations and communities particularly at risk. Temperature rises above 2C will be very difficult for contemporary societies to cope with.”

Key Message 3: Long Term Strategy stressed that “rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid ‘dangerous climate change’ regardless of how it is defined. Delay in initiating effective mitigation actions increases significantly the long-term social and economic costs of both adaptation and mitigation.”

Key Message 4: Equity Dimensions emphasized that “climate change is having, and will have, strongly differential effects on people within and between countries and regions, on this generation and future generations, and on human societies and the natural world.”

The delegates recommended the use of tools and governance practices to address these fundamental concerns. Conflict preventive measures, conflict transformation and resolution are essential to meet climate change challenges.

Rio and Kyoto Precedents


The COP 15 Provisional Agenda, reviewed in Bonn, Germany in early June, lists a range of essential issues, from emission reduction to technology transfer. Conflict prevention and resolution mechanisms are missing from the Agenda despite the fact that Article 14 of the 1992 UNFCCC (negotiated in New York and Rio de Janeiro and reaffirmed in Article 19 of the Kyoto Protocol) states that “in the event of a dispute between any two or more Parties concerning the interpretation or application of the Convention, the Parties concerned shall seek a settlement of the dispute through negotiation or any other peaceful means of their own choice.” This article, though, is not sufficient to address the complex conflicts between nations and peoples likely to emerge as climate change impacts accelerate. Conflict preventive measures and resolution mechanisms should be part of the talks in Bonn, Copenhagen, and beyond.

Beyond Rio and Kyoto, there is precedent for putting conflict resolution on the Climate Change Conference agenda. A number of UN treaties and conventions that deal with environmental issues include conflict or dispute resolution mechanisms. For example, the UN Convention on the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses, adopted in 1997 by the UN General Assembly, specifies conflict resolution methods. Agenda 21, the Environment and Development Agenda administered by the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) emphasizes conflict resolution.

Article 39.3 specifies the need:

g) To identify and prevent actual or potential conflicts, particularly between environmental and social/economic agreements or instruments, with a view to ensuring that such agreements or instruments are consistent. Where conflicts arise, they should be appropriately resolved;

    h) To study and consider the broadening and strengthening of the capacity of mechanisms, inter alia in the United Nations system, to facilitate, where appropriate and agreed by the parties concerned, the identification, avoidance and settlement of international disputes in the field of sustainable development, duly taking into account existing bilateral and multilateral agreements for the settlement of such disputes.

An Important Commitment


Climate change negotiators and decision-makers should affirm the commitment that people, communities, and nations will not be in violent situations due to conflicts that arise as a consequence of climate change. Politicians, diplomats, and specialists who attend the Climate Change meetings should consider conflict prevention measures and resolution mechanisms.

The climate change crisis challenges people throughout the world to invent and implement innovative ways to mitigate and thwart climate changing causes and effects. The crisis calls for new methods for nations and people to overcome differences and work together with the objective of preventing, minimising and resolving conflict arising because of limited resources and/or the effects of climate change.

Construction of a new global conflict prevention and resolution infrastructure is critical to a comprehensive international climate change policy. Such construction can start with the Copenhagen conference, with discussions of conflict prevention and resolution along side the negotiations of scientific and technical issues of climate change.

Copenhagen DK, Corvallis and Santa Monica USA – 22 May 2009

Gregg Walker, Tina Monberg, and Kenneth Cloke of Mediators Beyond Borders, 
Jens Emborg, Mie Marcussen, Lone Clausen, and Vibeke Vindeløv of Nordic Mediators

The authors’ affiliations:


Gregg Walker, Ph.D., Professor of Speech Communication, Oregon State University, USA (gwalker@orst.edu)


Tina Monberg, Mediator, exam. psychotherapist and lawyer, Mediationcenter Ltd., Denmark (tm@mediationcenter.dk)


Kenneth Cloke, Mediator, President of Mediators Beyond Borders, California, USA (kcloke@aol.com)


Jens Emborg, Ph.d. MMCR, Associate Professor of Environmental Conflict, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (jee@life.ku.dk)


Mie Marcussen, M.Sc., MMCR, Mediator, President of Nordic Mediators, Private Consultant, Denmark (kontakt@miemarcussen.dk)


Lone Clausen, MMCR, Developing Aid and Crises Expert, Private Consultant, Danmark (lc@direkte.org)


Vibeke Vindeløv, Dr., Professor of Mediation and Conflict Resolution, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (Vibeke.Vindelov@jur.ku.dk)
 

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Check out today's ADR Prof Blog post What are their interests?  Negotiating with North Korea.  Excerpt below.

North Korea recently sentenced two U.S. journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, to 12 years of hard labor for illegally crossing the North Korean border.  By all accounts imprisonment in North Korea, especially in a labor camp, is horrible and potentially life-threatening.  The question now is whether their early release can be negotiated. 

 

This situation poses an extreme example of a difficult negotiation.  Power and culture are key factors.  The challenge in this negotiation is to understand what matters to the North Koreans and to use that understanding to work towards an agreement to release Ling and Lee.  But gaining this understanding is complicated because the North Korean government keeps the country closed to most foreigners which means that few U.S. citizens have experience in North Korea, much less experience negotiating with the government.  Reportedly the State Department is engaged on Ling and Lee’s behalf—but without full diplomatic representation that engagement is limited (particularly when the North Koreans prevent the U.S. Envoy for North Korea from even entering the country).  Potential candidates to act as negotiators include New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (who has successfully negotiated with the North Koreans in the past) and former Vice-President Al Gore (who owns Current TV, the company the journalists were working for).

Continue reading here.

Time to Revisit the Resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis

the president [Kennedy] recognized that, for Chairman Khrushchev to withdraw the missiles from Cuba, it would be undoubtedly helpful to him if he could say at the same time to his colleagues on the Presidium, "And we have been assured that the missiles will be coming out of Turkey." And so, after the ExComm meeting [on the evening of 27 October 1962], as I'm sure almost all of you know, a small group met in President Kennedy's office, and he instructed Robert Kennedy—at the suggestion of Secretary of State [Dean] Rusk—to deliver the letter to Ambassador Dobrynin for referral to Chairman Khrushchev, but to add orally what was not in the letter: that the missiles would come out of Turkey.

Ambassador Dobrynin felt that Robert Kennedy's book did not adequately express that the "deal" on the Turkish missiles was part of the resolution of the crisis. And here I have a confession to make to my colleagues on the American side, as well as to others who are present. I was the editor of Robert Kennedy's book. It was, in fact, a diary of those thirteen days. And his diary was very explicit that this was part of the deal; but at that time it was still a secret even on the American side, except for the six of us who had been present at that meeting. So I took it upon myself to edit that out of his diaries, and that is why the Ambassador is somewhat justified in saying that the diaries are not as explicit as his conversation.

From Sorensen comments, in Bruce J. Allyn, James G. Blight, and David A. Welch, eds., Back to the Brink: Proceedings of the Moscow Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, January 27-28, 1989 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), pp. 92-93.

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Women in the United States Judiciary

2009 State Court Judges in the US:

• 4,325 women of 16,950 total
• 26% women

2008 Federal Court Judges

• 47 of 164 active judges on the thirteen federal courts of appeal are male (29%).
• 25% of United States district (or trial) court judges were women in 2008.

Women in Corporate America

• In November 2002, women represent 15.7% of the corporate officers in America’s 500 largest companies. These percentages are up from 12.5% in 2000 and 8.7% in 1995.
• In April 2002, there were six female CEOs in the Fortune 500 and a total of eleven in the Fortune 1000.
• The number of women corporate officers:  2,140 out of 13,673.
• The number of women corporate officers:  2,140 out of 13,673. T
• Almost 95% or 2,141 of the top earning corporate officers are men, compared to only 188 or 5.2% of women top earners in the Fortune 500.

Earnings on the Dollar Compared to Men

• Asian/other women: 67 cents
• White women: 59 cents
• African American women: 57 cents
• Hispanic women: 48 cents

Family

• Women managers are more likely to be single parents than male managers.
• Women managers who are unmarried and have children under 18: 22 percent African-American, 15 percent Hispanic, 8 percent White, and 5 percent Asian/other women.

Women Lawyers

 JOIN THE PROFESSIONAL WOMEN'S NETWORK OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA TODAY!  We're "on the ground" locally and online nationally.  Building business one relationship at a time.

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Anatomy of an Arbitration Disaster

Amanda Bronstad
The National Law Journal
June 17, 2009

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge on May 28 affirmed an arbitration award of more than $4.1 billion, sending shock waves through the labor and employment bar in California.

The award went to Paul Thomas Chester, a former executive at iFreedom Communications Inc., who brought a wrongful termination suit against his former employer, its affiliated businesses and the founder, Timothy Ringgenberg.

The case ended up before an arbitrator, William F. McDonald, a retired supervising judge of the Orange County, Calif., Superior Court's complex civil litigation panel, who now works at JAMS.

Michael D. Young, a partner in the Los Angeles office of Atlanta's Alston & Bird, wrote about the award on his firm's labor and employment blog, "Who's the Boss?" Young spoke to The National Law Journal about the lessons that employment lawyers and their clients could learn from the outcome in this case regarding arbitration agreements and the arbitration process.

Young also broke down the award, to explain how the arbitrator came up with such an astronomically high number.

Read the full interview here.

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