Negotiation Law Blog

On October 27, WLALA’s new ADR Committee, Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, and the American Arbitration Association will jointly host Smart Women Arbitrate (or do they?). The event will commence at 6:30 p.m., with cocktails and networking at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP in Century City.  The panel discussion will take place between 7 and 8:30 p.m., followed by another half hour of networking.

We are incredibly excited to have a talented panel talking about the many ways in which the arbitral forum can be transformed to serve as many client interests as possible, including economies of time and money without sacrificing your own or your clients’ justice issues. The panel will also address diversity and inclusion in the ranks of arbitrators.

Here’s another familiar character. This man was once the kid who shook you down for your lunch money on the elementary school playground. The boy who taunted you in gym whenever you failed to pass the basketball to the only teammate able to sink it. The swaggering delinquent who blew smoke in your face whenever you passed by.

Bullying is not, however, only the domain of the male animal. There’s no bully quite as deadly as the high-school girl who uses her new-found talent for empathy as a laser gun directed at her friends’ fragile teenage hearts. While boys tend to use physical superiority to intimidate, girls use the “gentler” arts of ridicule, gossip and shunning.

Like the asshole, no one can be a bully alone in her room. She needs someone to be a bully to. A bully is another relationship in crisis. Bullies inexplicably name victims as sources of discontent, blame those people for their unhappiness and claim a right to retaliate.

Before we throw stones at our fellows, let’s talk about the only bully whose behavior we can control. Let’s talk about us.

(in the criminal justice system, victims rarely get to have their say)

Every act of violence requires a victim, and every victim a perpetrator. Even if victim and offender are strangers, in the searing moment when a violent crime is committed they become inextricably bound in one of the most painful human relationships imaginable.

Lyndy is a victim of violent crime. When we meet her, she is pregnant with her first child. When we meet the man who raped her at knife-point fourteen years earlier, it is her own brother, Tim, to whom we are introduced. Tim is serving the thirteenth of a twenty-year prison sentence for his crime. Lyndy is serving her own kind of sentence, one which can only be commuted by Tim.

Lyndy and Tim’s story of violent crime, accountability, forgiveness and restoration – told in the award-winning documentary, Beyond Conviction – reminds us that remedies exist to heal the wounds inflicted by nearly every damaged human relationship.

By anyone’s standards, the Pennsylvania criminal justice system has done for Lyndy the job it was supposed to. Tim was arrested, charged with rape, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. The punishment meted out to Tim, however, did nothing to help Lyndy recover life as she knew it before that terrifying November night when Tim came home drunk, flew into a rage, held a knife to Lyndy's throat, forced her upstairs and repeatedly raped her.

Twelve years after Tim's sentencing Lyndy found herself close to suicide. If she took her own life, Tim’s curse, his terrible prophecy, would come true – that by his hand, Lyndy’s life would be ruined. Lyndy perservered and when she she became pregnant two years later, she sought out the services of Pennsylvania's restorative justice program, a program devoted to doing that which the criminal justice does not, and cannot, do – heal the victim. When asked why she wanted to meet with her brother after so many years, Lyndy explained. “I want to raise my son to be a kind and forgiving and caring person and I can't do that if I can’t be kind and forgiving and caring to the one person who has hurt me the most.”

Lyndy wants to forgive. But we cannot forgive that which we do not understand. Nor can we forgive someone who is unwilling to take responsibility for the harm he has caused. That would just make us more of a victim – doormats, co-conspirators to our own injury. Lyndy wants – she needs – her brother to acknowledge his responsibility for her suffering. She wants to tell him that nothing in their mutually difficult childhood could possibly justify his crime. And like so many victims, she wants to know that the rape was not her fault.

 My Twitter account tells me I have more than 2,000 “followers,” and my Facebook page suggests I add someone new to my account as a “friend” nearly every day. 

Despite our modern online age, people do not become friends (or loyal followers) at the push of a button. We start friendships tentatively, with small admissions of fallibility that won’t entirely rip away the costume of the person we’re pretending to be.

"I’m actually shy,” I tell an incredulous acquaintance. “The bravado masks it.”

"I pause and wait for a reciprocal revelation signaling a common desire to take the relationship in a more intimate direction – one in which I signal my willingness to be trusting and demonstrate my ability to be trusted.

"Me, too,” my potential friend might acknowledge. “I’m actually driven by fear. I know I seem confident, but all this apparent success makes me feel like a fraud. Worse, I’m always feeling guilty that I’m not a better, more attentive mother to my children because I’m so busy pursuing my own success. That’s selfish, don’t you think?”

With this response my acquaintance is not only reciprocating our growing intimacy, she is deepening it. I was merely talking about my professional life. She’s now drilled down into her relationship with her children. We are taking baby steps to friendship, testing one another’s ability to move beyond our public selves and open up the door to our private lives and secret fears. We are putting something of ourselves on the line – something vulnerable and valuable – in the hope of finding another person who knows and cares about us, warts and all.

When you consider how vitally important friends are to our emotional well-being, it’s surprising we don’t have more friendship owners’ manuals or, for that matter, friendship counseling. Bookstores are filled with advice manuals for marriages and parenting, but few titles advise us on the care and feeding of our friends – people who  outlast marriages and endure long past the time our children leave home.

What happens when friendships go bad and what, if anything, should we be doing to tend our friendship garden?

For the answer to this and many more conflict resolution questions, you'll have to buy the book, A is for Asshole, the Grownups' ABCs of Conflict Resolution!  We'll keep you up to date here on the publication date, which will be before the holidays.

Cross-posted at She Negotiates

What does this man have that you don't?

A year-end 2009 salary of $21,340,547 during one of the worst year's in the history of his industry ~ banking.

Listen!  The recession is just another excuse for not paying you what you're worth.

How do we know?

Because the most effective negotiators on the planet ~ corporate CEO's ~ are finding the downturn to be the best time to squeeze every last living dollar out of their employers.

If they can do it, so can you!

 Here's the evidence:

	Bank of America Corp. Thomas Montag 2009 Total Compensation: $29,930,431		JPMorgan Chase & Co. James Dimon 2009 Total Compensation: $9,274,494
	Citigroup Inc. John Havens 2009 Total Compensation: $11,276,454		Morgan Stanley Walid Chammah 2009 Total Compensation: $10,021,969
	The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Lloyd Blankfein 2009 Total Compensation: $9,862,657		Wells Fargo John Stumpf 2009 Total Compensation: $21,340,547

 Whhaaaaaatttttt? do these men have that you don't have?

• Social networks with rich and powerful people who sit on their Boards of Directors and influence policy makers and Wall Street power brokers
• The self-created illusion that they are "too big to fail" /1
• The persuasive argument that only they, with their unique combination of experience, education, knowledge, savvy, can-do-spirit, and leadership qualities can pull these banks out of the sinkhole of the recession.
• Friends in very high places.
• Chutzpah and shamelessness (not that we'd want to encourage this second character flaw in our readers).
• Self-satisfaction.
• Entitlement.
• An employment history of asking for and receiving increasing levels of compensation based upon their salary negotiations at every career point possible (and every career point impossible)
• the demonstrated ability to produce results (our readers do possess this strength but haven't used it to their greatest advantage yet)
• the tendency to measure their market value by their value in the hands of their employer, not by what they "need" or what they are "worth" according to some internal metric that depends upon how they feel about thier accomplishments.

__________________

1/  This is where collective action comes in.  When we aggregate together America's employees, small business owners and homeowners, we get a non-corporate "entity" that is waaaayyyyyy bigger than some little piss-ant bank and it is we who are too big to fail.

Most law firms state their commitment to diversity and inclusivity, prominently featuring on their diversity pages the pathetically few women and minorities in positions of genuine economic power in the firm.  Are they walking the talk?  Let me count the ways.

O'Melveny & Myers ~ We attract, retain, and promote people of all backgrounds, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, age, religion, disability, or any other group characteristics.

201 male partners and 21 women ~ 10%.  In the legal realm, you win awards for this.

O’Melveny & Myers LLP has been named to The American Lawyer’s 2010 A-List, which recognizes the nation’s most elite law firms for stellar performance in the areas of revenue generation, pro bono commitment, associate satisfaction, and diversity representation.  This is the Firm’s third consecutive year on the list of 20 firms judged best at balancing the practice of law with their obligations to the profession.

I don't mean to pick on O'Melveny.  It's representative of the whole.  Any AmLaw100 law firm that would like to crow about its great track record in retaining and promoting women and minorities, please do drop by with your results and suggestions to your peers for improvements in these figures that the smartest guys in the room just can't seem to be capable of figuring out.  

Today, Forbes Corporate Social Responsibility Blog is commencing a series on how a serious commitment to diversity results in improved bottom line performance.  I commend that series to the attention of the real powers that be inside AmLaw 100 law firms and they cannot be found in the Diversity Programs, of that I can assure you.  Here's the intro to the McDonald's diversity program series:

How does a company that serves 56 million customers a day across 118 countries become a leader in diversity hiring and retention? According to the inclusion and diversity team at McDonald’s, it takes a combination of knowing how to leverage a multicultural customer base, a C-suite-led commitment to talent management, and academic-style learning labs.

If you're a woman, like me, we have our own garden to tend.  We leave the Fortune 50 and the AmLaw100 out of discouragement.  But part of that discouragement is born of our own diminished expectations and failures to build serious rain-making activities into our daily practices along with our failures to demand assignments to the types of cases where partners are made.

If your law firm or corporation does not have a serious diversity program, click your ruby slippers three times, say "there's no place like the board room," take the She Negotiates signature course, and kick a little butt. 

Remember, as Gloria Steinem said, "the truth shall set you free, but first, it will piss you off."

Cross-posted at She Negotiates.

For an enlightened manly-man resolution to the patently insane prospect of litigating a $40,000 dispute, see the WSJ Law Blog post ADR Chronicles: Taylor Lautner Gets Settlement Offer for the Ages

Lautner . . . star of the “Twilight” movies, recently sued McMahon, the owner of an RV dealership in Irvine, Calif, for allegedly failing to deliver a customized vehicle in time for the shoot of his new movie, “Abduction.”

On Monday, McMahon presented what we can only consider to be an awesome solution to the dustup: settle it with pushups. That’s right: whoever can do more pushups — McMahon or Lautner — wins the lawsuit. Click here for the story, from the Hollywood Reporter.

McMahon and attorney Adam Obeid say the Lautners and their lawyers demanded $40,000 before filing the lawsuit. But they offered up a different idea: If Lautner shows up and wins the push-up contest, McMahon will pay him and his Shark Kid Entertainment the $40,000 to settle the case. If McMahon wins, he’ll donate the $40,000 to Children’s Hospital of Orange County.

“We’re taking a negative and making it into a positive to benefit the sick children at Children’s Hospital of Orange County,” McMahon said at the press conference. He says he has other sponsors willing to chip in if Lautner appears.

 

. . . and the Supreme Court has it.  Check out The Female Factor over at Slate (excerpt below):