Negotiation Law Blog

Of the thousands of words I’ve written about women in the law, not one contains the word “secretary” or “assistant” and that’s just wrong.

Ask any lawyer. Nothing happens in a law firm – certainly nothing happens well – in the absence of experienced, professional, well-compensated legal secretaries.

For a woman lawyer like myself, it’s a particularly egregious oversight to have completely ignored legal secretaries and assistants in a career-oriented blog for women.

My own willful blindness to women’s issues in the office place is one of the reasons I was so impressed by law professor Felice Batlan’spresentation on legal secretaries at last week’s South Carolina Women Lawyers Association annual conference, as more thoroughly explored in her article If You Become His Second Wife You Are a Fool: Shifting Paradigms of the Roles, Perceptions and Working Conditions of Legal Secretaries in Large Law Firms.

In my own puny defense, let me first say that I was never expected to be anything other than a teacher, a nurse or a secretary until I got married, after which I would, of course, never work again unless (god forbid) something should happen to my husband.

Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those professions. It’s just that they are all I was given to choose from when I was graduating from high school in 1970 and entering college.

A couple of years and a women’s movement later, I’d somewhat hesitantly tell my mother that I was applying to law school. In response, she asked why I didn’t become a legal secretary instead. They made good money and I could meet and marry a lawyer.

“I don’t want to marry a lawyer, mom. I want to be a lawyer.”

There you have the set up for a few decades in legal practice ignoring the plight of my secretaries.

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“It is more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier,” says Pan African Parliament Women’s Conference President, Mavis Matladi of South Africa as she leads the call for the inclusion of more women in UN peace and reconstruction negotiations.

According to Matladi, there has never been a female U.N. chief peace negotiator, fewer than eight percent of all negotiating delegations in U.N. mediated peace processes are women, and only three percent of all peace agreement signatories are women.

The need is clear. Marie Louise Baricako, the Chairperson of the Femmes Africa Solidarité claims that the use of rape and sexual violence as a weapon remains a neglected topic. “It goes unpunished, and unrecognized,” she emphasizes, leaving the perpetrators free to inaugurate a new culture of rape and violence.

As the U.N. Women’s War and Peace page reports:

While women remain a minority of combatants and perpetrators of war, they increasingly suffer the greatest harm.

In contemporary conflicts, as much as 90 percent of casualties are among civilians, most of whom are women and children. Women in war-torn societies can face specific and devastating forms of sexual violence, which are sometimes deployed systematically to achieve military or political objectives. Women are the first to be affected by infrastructure breakdown, as they struggle to keep families together and care for the wounded.

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Just a few days ago I wrote a post quoting Mavis Matladi of South Africa saying that war is more dangerous to the women who suffer through it than it is for the men and boys who fight it.

Today I learn from the U.S. Military Violence against Women Blog that a PBS documentary series about Women War Peace will begin next week on October 11 and continue through November 8.

Abigail Disney, daughter and granddaughter of two leaders of the Walt Disney Company produced the film I recommended in that post - Pray the Devil Back to Hell – and is one of the executive producers of the upcoming PBS series.

The series features women peace-builders in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Colombia, and Liberia.

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu last week, the first step to resuming Middle East peace negotiations.

At the meeting, Netanyahu observed that peace can only be achieved through talks, but that one cannot negotiate on negotiations alone.

As an opening line meant to characterize Israel’s preferred structure for peace negotiations, this phrase appears on its face to be incoherent. It would be a mistake, however, to accept it as irrational or careless.

This is a high stakes poker game and everything the players say represents their attempt to frame the negotiation in a manner that serves their interests.

One cannot negotiate on negotiations alone could reasonably be construed to mean:

• talk is not enough, we also need action;
• we’re willing to make concessions but only if our counterparts are prepared to make meaningful concessions themselves (a variant of action);
• we’re willing to listen but we will not make concessions based on speech alone; or
• Ronald Reagan’s famous dictum, we will trust but verify.

Satisfying Your Stakeholders While Bargaining with Theirs

As this past summer’s debt negotiations amply demonstrated, you cannot negotiate a deal in the harsh light of day. You need the ability to float trial balloons, make package offers, de-couple issues and positions from interests, strategically bluff and stonewall, trade power for sympathy (ingratiate), threaten, log-roll and dovetail. Most of these techniques are discussed in How to Get a Raise in 2011.

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Quick! Name a conflict that will never be resolved.

You chose the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, right?  Or perhaps it was a simmering conflict closer to home? Having just marked the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Americans might think of the seemingly endless fighting in Afghanistan.

Now think Islamofascism – a term that conflates the religion of 1.5 billion people with a political doctrine so odious that its very name is synonymous with absolute evil. The non-hyphenated Islamofascist is a hologram of a conflict that cannot be resolved. Because you can’t negotiate – or even talk – with the devil. And though you may know some very nice Muslims and have never met an Islamofascist, you’d know him if you saw him. And the one thing you wouldn’t be doing is negotiating because negotiating presumes compromise.

And you don’t compromise with Satan.

The conflict implied by the corrosive Islamofascist mash-up is one the social scientists call intractable.  The dictionary definition of intractable is “difficult or stubborn” but you and I know it means impossible to resolve.

You can tell a conflict is intractable when you ask the parties to say something nice about the other and all you get is a stream of invective. Try this over dinner with relatives from the opposite political party.

Say something good about

a. Barack Obama.

b. Michelle Bachmann.

Give up? You’re not alone.

Discouraged? Don’t be.

Hope that Conflict Can Be Resolved Helps People Resolve Conflict

Researchers have demonstrated that “simply reading a few sentences about the successful resolutions of historic conflicts elsewhere made Israelis and Palestinians more amenable to compromise.”

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