About Us

Victoria Pynchon

I mediate and arbitrate complex commercial disputes, the former with ADR Services, Inc. in Century City and the latter with...

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She Mediates

ADR Services, Inc.

She Negotiates

She Negotiates

The 33 cent wage and income gap is unacceptable and unnecessary. So is the cliché glass ceiling. Bottom line, our...

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Should We Sell Out Our Girlfriends to Further Our Careers?

Posted by Victoria Pynchon on October 29, 2011

Because I write for ForbesWoman, I get email and telephone calls. Not the frightening women-bashing kind, but the reaching out for advice-kind. It’s one of the many great benefits of blogging there.

Just a few months ago, I received an email from a new lawyer who was in the job market after working in the public sector for a few years. She wanted to start a blog and was curious about the effects the expression of her political opinions might have on her career trajectory.

If Carrie Bradshaw were framing the issue she might write:

Should We Sell Out Our Girlfriends to Further Our Careers?

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know my deal with the devil already.

Long story short – I was extremely active in the Second Wave women’s movement, working full time as a Vista volunteer (for the $200/month stipend) at the Center for Women’s Studies and Services in San Diego.

First week of law school, I made my way to a classroom in the basement where the Women Law Students Association (now the Feminist Forum) was having an introductory meeting for new students.

“I don’t want to ally myself with women anymore,” I thought. “I just want to be a law student, not a woman law student. I want to be a lawyer, not a woman lawyer.”

And that was the end of my involvement with women’s organizations for thirty years.

So, yes, I did stop supporting my women friends to further my career. But did I have to?

Is it Worth It?

When the young woman lawyer who wrote me for advice called, I answered her question the best way I knew how.

“Yes, you will limit your market if you express your political opinions publicly. There are people who will not hire you as an associate attorney in their law firms and others who will not retain your services as a lawyer. It’s a personal moral decision – one only you can make.

“No one can tell you what to do. If you have something important to say about the status of women in the law and you don’t say it, it might not get said. And the women who need support, whose spirits are flagging because they don’t hear your voice in the desert, might suffer a spiritual death from the thirst.”

Continue reading here ->>

Is Your Secretary Working in an Emotional Sweatshop?

Posted by Victoria Pynchon on October 24, 2011

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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Getting Your Man (or Woman) To Do What You Want

Posted by Victoria Pynchon on October 17, 2011

 

Getting Him to Do What You Want
posted by VICTORIA PYNCHON
Over at Psychology Today, mental health professional Steven Stosny recommends negotiation rather than coercion, manipulation, persuasion or “incentive/bartering” to prompt your spouse or other romantic partner to do what you want him to do.
“We’ve evolved a few tricks over the millennia,” writes Stosny, “but most of them are not adaptable to complex modern relationships.”
After condemning manipulation, coercion, bartering and persuasive argument, Stosny unsurprisingly recommends negotiation focused on feelings rather than on behavior, a distinction without a difference for those who realize that love is not a feeling but an action.
Though I’m no marriage counselor and certainly not a psychologist or therapist, I do know a bit about how people in conflict manage to transcend their disputes, transform their relationships, and find mutually satisfactory means of turning cross-purposes into shared values.
continue »

Over at Psychology Today, mental health professional Steven Stosny recommends negotiation rather than coercion, manipulation, persuasion or “incentive/bartering” to prompt your spouse or other romantic partner to do what you want him to do.

“We’ve evolved a few tricks over the millennia,” writes Stosny, “but most of them are not adaptable to complex modern relationships.”

After condemning manipulation, coercion, bartering and persuasive argument, Stosny unsurprisingly recommends negotiation focused on feelings rather than on behavior, a distinction without a difference for those who realize that love is not a feeling but an action.

Though I’m no marriage counselor and certainly not a psychologist or therapist, I do know a bit about how people in conflict manage to transcend their disputes, transform their relationships, and find mutually satisfactory means of turning cross-purposes into shared values.

continue »

 

It Is More Dangerous to Be a Woman than a Soldier

Posted by Victoria Pynchon on October 08, 2011

“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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Get Your Blog Out of the Sandbox and Off to Work

Posted by Victoria Pynchon on October 08, 2011

 

If you’re blogging to market your goods or your services, please raise your hand.
Thought so.
That’s 99.9999% of you.
If you understand blog analytics, keep your hand up.
O.K., 33% isn’t bad.
Now keep it up if you know how to get your blog out of the kindergarten sand-box and into a suit and tie?
.00001%.
I was in that small percentage until this morning when I read How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Content Marketing by Canadian attorney Michael Webster, a “key partner” at the International Association of Franchisees and Dealers (the organization for the the men and women whose small businesses are Carl’s Juniors or Taco Bells).
continue »

If you’re blogging to market your goods or your services, please raise your hand.

Thought so.

That’s 99.9999% of you.

If you understand blog analytics, keep your hand up.

O.K., 33% isn’t bad.

Now keep it up if you know how to get your blog out of the kindergarten sand-box and into a suit and tie?

.00001%.

I was in that small percentage until this morning when I read How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Content Marketing by Canadian attorney Michael Webster, a “key partner” at the International Association of Franchisees and Dealers (the organization for the the men and women whose small businesses are Carl’s Juniors or Taco Bells).

continue »

 

 

Celebrate Women's Peace Work on PBS

Posted by Victoria Pynchon on October 08, 2011

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.

continue reading here>>

The Top Ten Most Peaceful Countries Don't Include US

Posted by Victoria Pynchon on October 08, 2011

Business, as the greatest beneficiary of peaceful trade relations, should be among the most prominent supporters of nonviolent dispute resolution.

You can’t negotiate a good business deal – one the maximizes value for both parties – if you cannot count on its enforcement in an environment free of violence.

In honor of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winners – Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakkul Karman - we celebrate those countries named as the ten most peaceful by the Global Peace Index for 2011 - Iceland, New Zealand, Japan, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Austria, Finland, Canada, Norway, and Slovenia – and challenge American businesses to ramp up their charitable donations to peace organizations with the goal of moving the United States into the top ten by 2020.

Continue reading here>>