Creating a Positive Professional Image

Music Downloads: Pirates-or Customers?

A Balanced Scorecard Approach to Measure Customer Profitability

Marketing Your Way Through a Recession

Understanding Users of Social Networks

Social Network Marketing: What Works?

Enron's Lessons for Managers

Power Posing: Fake It Until You Make It

10 Reasons to Design a Better Corporate Culture

Updating a Classic: Writing a Great Business Plan

Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting

How Can Decision Making Be Improved?

Do Friends Influence Purchases in a Social Network?

Communication (and Coordination?) in a Modern, Complex Organization

From Strategy to Business Models and to Tactics

The Devil Wears Prada? Effects of Exposure to Luxury Goods on Cognition and Decision Making

Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship

The End of Chimerica

Authority versus Persuasion

Speaking Up Constructively: Managerial Practices that Elicit Solutions from Front-Line Employees

I love speaking to women, particularly about negotiating their market value and shattering the glass ceiling one at a time and with one another's support.

I never intended to make speaking part of my career.  For four years I simply used it as a marketing tool to engage my market and prove my market value.  But when you do something long enough and work at it hard enough, eventually you'll want to monetize it.  So it was that I was sitting at lunch in South Carolina listening to Deb Sofield (above) give her fifteen rules for ruling the room and ensuring that the audience had a good time under her benevolent dictatorship.

Still, I was thinking, OMG!!! Deb's listing at least half the things I do badly!!  How am I expected to follow this????  And for the first time in years I had actual stage fright.

Here's the happy end to this story and the reason I want you to go to Deb's website right now and hire her, follow her, read her newsletter, and do whatever she says to do because my performance as a speaker immediately following her talking points improved a full 100%. And speakership is leadership and leadership is the brass ring. You need it to enter and stay in the executive suite; to "make rain" and retain clients; and to make anything you want to happen, happen, even if it's just getting the kids to bed on time (Deb's rule:  short sentences, big ideas).  Build a school in Africa or bring medical care to South Central Los Angeles.  Run for office (one of Deb's specialties).  Make the world a better place.

That's how powerful speaking can be after you've spent 20 minutes with Deb. So go to Deb's website now. Invite her to speak to your group of women and pay her very very well because she is one of the few women on the speaker's circuit today who can literally, spontaneously and instantaneously transform the quality of your life.

Then I'll tell you why speaking is negotiating. (cross-posted on the She Negotiates blog here)

Angela was profiled in the Daily Journal today here.  As that profile noted,

Drawing on her years of experience in alternate dispute resolution, [Angela] is creating a section on women in ADR. The association has many ADR professionals in its membership, she noted, but this will be the first time it has had a section dedicated to women who have made great inroads into what had become a male-dominated practice.

Haskins also will keep a eye on addressing the changing dynamics affecting women lawyers. Two years ago, she said, WLALA President Kathy Forester of Munger, Tolles & Olson created a joint task force for women, focusing on how to make partner, stay partner and to make that be an important part of their career.

I'll be chairing the ADR Committee this year.  As part of Angela's Empowerment theme, the ADR Committee's activities will be highlighting its own "Women Do Refer" initiative ~ details here and at WLALA's web page here soon.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ANGELA!

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.

One last time!! before the door closes on the opportunity to have your picture in the WLALA Tribute book and to share two tables with your fellow neutrals at the WLALA annual Installation Dinner and Gala. 

I have three more places at the table and on that ad.  I need your check for $175 and a .jpg by Friday to put you in it!  Please, let's show WLALA how eager we are to cross-refer business.

This is a particularly good year to join us as we begin the first WLALA ADR initiative in its nearly 100 year history.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS! of women lawyers - way past time to reach and firmly occupy the higher reaches of the profession.  We've been graduating from the nation's law schools in nearly equal numbers with men for more than 20 years.  My own U.C. law school class (King Hall, '80) was 50% women thirty years ago.

The ADR pipeline is full of competent -- indeed glorious -- women.  Yet the statistics at the top remain grim.

Chopped Liver?

Why is your ADR practice not everything that Tony Piazza's or Eric Green's or even Steve Cerveris' is?  Research shows that both men and women have negative implicit attitudes toward women in leadership and authority positions.  The good news is that women are slightly less pre-disposed than are men to picture a man in a suit when they're looking for access to money and power.  I've had at least half a dozen women commercial litigators look straight at me and say "I don't know any women mediators."

Huh????

Followed by, "well their names are never on the lists [circulated in my firm]."

Women, with their slightly reduced inability to "see" women in authority positions, are our foot in the door. And the new WLALA ADR Committee is our opportunity to open that door wide.

As a member of the CPR-led Joint Task Force on Diversity, I have heard the verdict of JAMS and the AAA.  "The market has spoken.  Commercial lawyers just don't hire women and minorities."

What????

We're advocates, for goodness sakes.  When we come into town we have to register our skills of persuasion with local law enforcement authorities.  We're change agents, opinion makers, powerful holders of the keys to the kingdom. 

And the market has spoken? 

We make the market!

This year's ADR Committee is dedicated to closing the gaping void between men and women neutrals.  We're not going to ask for special treatment, picket the LASC's ADR office, pass new laws or burn our ADR certificates, Super Lawyer plaques, Ivy League diplomas, or our bras (not at this age!). 

We're going to market like no one has ever marketed before and we're going to do so as a group so that we don't each hesitate, as we women tend to do, to promote ourselves and our services.

2010 and 2011 will be the years in which top women will refer to other top women.  2010 and 2011 will be the years in which we close the income gap not only between men and women neutrals but between men and women lawyers (its 40% at the top).  2010 and 2011 will be the years in which we make a market younger women lawyers will be entering in the next decade and the one after that -- one in which they'll flourish after they grow weary of fighting over interrogatory objections and e-discovery.

How?

Marketing.  Proctor and Gamble does  not say, "well, the market doesn't want a new improved laundry detergent."  P&G asks "how?" not "can we?"  And it certainly never says "we give up, the market has spoken."

We're putting our first stake in the ground on September 16 at the  WLALA Gala.  There's no event more important for women neutrals to attend this year. 

Our current attendees will appear in two full-page ads in the Tribute Book and two color flyers to be distributed at the dinner. 

To date those women are Eleanor Barr, Joan Kessler, Lynne Bassis, Katherine Edwards, Laurel Kaufer, Linda Klibanow, Denise Madigan, Stephanie Maloney, Deborah Rothman, Jan Frankel Schau, Gretchen Taylor, Caroline Vincent, Diane Wayne, Linda Bulmash, Lisa Gates (my She Negotiates business partner), Kathy Balin, and Erica Bristol. 

We need three more women neutrals to fill table two.  If you want to sit at another table, ask a woman litigator to change places with you while whispering "cross-refer" in her ear.  The key is that you'll be there to network.  You'll show your support to WLALA by showing up and WLALA women (among the most entrepreneurial in the Bar) will see your beautiful face and panel affiliation or business name in the  Tribute Book while enduring the inevitably tedious speeches at these events. 

Do you want to double your income by 2012?  If we've lasted this long in a profession that was solidly male when so many of us were in high school, we can close this gap by coming together and just doing it.

And if the $175 is too steep a price during these recessionary times or if you'll be out of town or otherwise engaged on the 16th of September, please let me know that you want to be a member of the new WLALA Committee by return email.

Our first event will be an afternoon on arbitration in October with CPR CEO Kathy Bryan and other powerful women attorneys, GC's and CEO's who arbitrate, either as advocates, as clients or as arbitrators.  The panel will be moderated by complex-commercial AAA arbitrator Deborah Rothman.

Shock me!  Let's fill Table Three!!

I look forward to hearing from you and to kicking the last pitiful shards out of that darn glass ceiling.

Best,

Vickie

Victoria Pynchon, Esq., Incoming Chair, WLALA ADR Committee
ADR Services, Inc. and She Negotiates Consulting and Training

EUREKA!!

'Enormous' Bargaining Chip: Survey Shows Law Firms Charging Clients Different Rates — for the Same Work!

Law firms' corporate clients are not created equal, if billing rates are any indication.

Firms are charging different hourly rates to different clients for doing similar work, according to an analysis of more than $4 billion in law firm billings that will be released in September.

Differences in billing rates are just some of the preliminary findings in the "Real Rate Report" by CT TyMetrix and The Corporate Executive Board. The report examines billing from more than 4,000 law firms, 50,000 individual billers, and 18.9 million invoice items from 2007 to 2009.

The data was collected from CT TyMetrix's clients. Law firms and corporate legal departments have been using the company's web-based financial and e-commerce software to handle ebilling and matter management for more than 10 years. About $30 billion in legal invoices have flowed through the company's systems, said Julie Peck, vice president of corporate strategy and market development at CT TyMetrix.

And the results of the report, once released, will be aimed at helping general counsel make better decisions about how and where to spend their money. The findings will be broken down by several factors, including geography, law firm size, staffing, and the types of matters handled.

"It will give general counsel an enormous amount of bargaining power," Peck said.

Read more of this is this is news to you here!

We’re celebrating Mothers Day by posting Blawg Review #263 at the She Negotiates Blog for one obvious and some not so obvious reasons.  The obvious reason is the word “She.”  The not-so-obvious reasons are:  (1) Mother’s Day was a peace and reconciliation movement before it was a holiday; and, (2) peace exists only when we have the political will to seek and the negotiation tools achieve the resolution of conflict.

In addition to the main post, we've also posted Blawg Review #263 on our She Networks, She Succeeds, She Transforms and She Resolves pages (up at the top of the blog).

by Susan Adams

 

The woman was interviewing for a lucrative position as director of a sales team. After having three great meetings full of lively conversation about how she'd handle the job, she was optimistic. But then came the fourth and final interview, with the company's executive vice president. Things were going swimmingly until the interviewee asked a question designed to lock in the offer: "Do you have any issues with my candidacy?"

 

"Frankly, yes," the executive replied. "You're good with people, but you don't have the analytic background we need. Not only would you need to steer the sales team, but you'd need to analyze information and data too." Shocked, the woman left the meeting realizing the offer she'd thought was in the bag was gone.

In a high-pressure job search, is it ever possible to turn a no into a yes?

Absolutely, says Robert Hellmann, a career coach at the Five O'Clock Club, a career counseling firm, who also teaches career development at New York University.  Hellmann was coaching that very woman, and he helped her turn the situation around.

After every job interview, Hellmann advises, you should write not a thank-you note but what he calls an "influence letter." In this case, that letter became his client's key to getting back into the running

The letter should always address the conversation you've had and your skills and experience. First, in the interview, you should ask what challenges the company is facing and what the new hire will need to do as soon as she starts work. In the influence letter, address those challenges concretely, ideally by describing similar challenges you've tackled at a previous job and how you handled them.

Continue reading here.

Once again, based upon my personal experience and that of tens of thousands of other women in commercial legal practice I continue to believe that until we are fairly represented on commercial ADR panels, both arbitration and mediation, we cannot expect significant change.  This may happen as a matter of the natural "aging" process of the field.  The ADR field looks now exactly like the legal field looked to me when I entered it in 1980.  Not surprising given the fact that ADR is historically a "retirement" field.  That is already changing, to beneficial effect.

For the adventuresome, Peter's pro-active recommendations below. I highly recommend, by the way, that you follow Peter's Business Conflict Blog.  It's one of the best out there.

(screen shot of google search for our local legal rag's "top 50 neutrals)

■ What if the country’s leading law firms—from which so many of our leading mediators and arbitrators emerge—had an incentive to encourage more diverse members of the firm to enter this field?

■ What if a benchmark survey were conducted to determine how often law firms suggest mediation to their clients; how often mediation is in fact tried; and how often diverse mediators are proposed to clients by outside lawyers and ADR provider organizations?

■ What if the property casualty insurance industry, as the largest consumer of legal services and of ADR services, conveyed its expectation that the firms that insurers pay for, when they propose mediators and arbitrators, will be expected to propose diverse individuals?

■ What if influential national ADR organizations combined forces to better reflect their corporate and legal constituents, and meet their customers’ expectations, by sharing information on excellent women and minorities who are not now on their lists, but should be?

■ What if initiatives were undertaken to encourage particularly promising women, younger people and minorities from firms to attend ADR colloquia, seminars and other events in order to network, learn and advance their visibility and recognition among the ADR community, as well as to contribute diverse views and perspectives?

■ What if a mentor program were designed and funded, pursuant to which younger female and minority attorneys could “shadow” established mediators and arbitrators (whether or not they are women or minorities) and establish skills and reputations thereby?

■ What if corporations and law firms intentionally engaged younger mediators who are women and minorities in smaller matters, so that those professionals would gain experience as neutrals and be better positioned for the larger cases?

■ What if scholarships were established to enable young people to be trained as mediators and arbitrators, with the expectation that a person thus trained would be skilled not only as a neutral, but more generally as a negotiator and client representative in settlement?

■ What if a very “early pipeline” were begun, and ADR institutions worked with Street Law Inc. (www.streetlaw.com), a national program that trains high school students in legal issues, or a similar organization to provide materials and information for children to become interested in ADR as a profession?

It is perplexing that this one aspect of the legal profession—a field that is otherwise so robust, so progressive and so creative—lags behind so miserably in satisfying client expectations for diverse practitioners. But there is no indication that it must be so. And with diligence, creativity and practical action, it will not long be so.

Here are more diversity resources from CPR.

(image from EdTechPost :  note on graph:  it doesn't have to be like this.  Twitter is a tool that can be used strategically as part of your marketing plan for a long, long time and it constantly gets better as the people who do these things build applications and as twitter adds new features; this is completely accurate about the start-up however)

Dear New Web 2.0 Attorney Inhabitant,

Welcome to the Island!  Here are a few of its founding principles and folkways:

1. the natives are friendly networkers who want to share their interests; their friends; their colleagues; their knowledge; and, their experience with you;
2. you may inhabit any part of the Island and as much of it as you wish; there are no borders here;
3. no one is interested in your bio here; they want to get to know who you really are; if they're sufficiently interested in that (because you're engaging, friendly, helpful and authentic) they'll eventually get around to asking you what you do for a living (most of them will have intuited it from your interests, however, and won't need to ask);
4. your primary purpose on the Island is to be of service to others;
5. play nice;
6. the Island doesn't require you to do anything - you may visit it and its inhabitants whenever you please; it is not your demanding, insistent, annoying, taxing "in" box; it is not email;
7. the island boasts educational institutions (law blogs, for instance, and at least one legal University - Solo Practice U); bar associations (Commercial Arbitrators and Mediators and Patent and Intellectual Property Practitioners); exhibit halls (I've set up a booth to sell my book here); help desks staffed by professionals and CEO's (at LinkedIn here); playgrounds (Facebook, depending upon how you choose to use it); and, a lovely river right outside of town that you can wander over to watch, in which to fish for information, or, onto which you can launch a boat of any type, size or design - twitter).

Here are some helpful hints if you want to visit the Island's river - Twitter.  

1. UNLOCK YOUR DOOR.  Nothing says "I'm not interested in you" like a velvet rope. Twitter, like all of web 2.0 is fanatically democratic.  If you get people in your network you don't want there (the Thai girls who want your sex-trade biz) you can simply block them.  
2. to get started on twitter, amble on over to the twitter boat house of someone you trust and respect; follow everyone they follow unless they're following more than 500 people, in which case follow the people on their twitter "lists" (my list of must follow legal and other people is here).
3. just watch the river for awhile.  Then retweet something someone says that interests you; the rest will follow.
4. remember who you are on this river - an attorney who specializes in employment law, for instance - and "tweet" consistently with your identity, remembering that you can and should socialize; provide value 90% of the time (linking, retweeting) and promote yourself 5% of the time (MAX).
5. don't wait to understand twitter-river before downloading tweetdeck.  Use it.  It's free.  It's easy.
6. Lawyers who tweet can be found at Kevin O'Keefe's "LexTweet." LexBlog lawyers like myself are gathered together at LexTweet here.

 

Remember what Malcolm Gladwell said in the Tipping Point.

Your first degree connections (you/me) will bring you the least amount of new business because you already know them and have presumably maximized their value to you (that sounds harsh; it's not, but if I added heart, this post would be way, way too long). 

Your most distant connections bring you the most work because you may be the only lawyer they know.  Although the people I know (lots of lawyers) might be good for your business, the people who know the people I know and the people who know them will ultimately be of the most value to you.

Rock 'n roll & welcome to Web 2.0.

Looking forward to seeing you on the Island.

Best,

Vickie

When asked whether the announcement of my affiliation with ADR Services, Inc. could be sent to my WLALA mailing list, I was told:  women don't refer!  Huh? 

In 2006, I formed the Professional Women's Network of Southern California for women executives, managers, professionals, and, entrepreneurs.  We now have more than 600 members spread across three social networking platforms LinkedIn (here); Meetup (here, here and here), and, ning (our true "home" here).

If women are in a position to refer, they refer.  And if they're in a position to refer to one another, they refer to one another.  Some women's initiatives at some major national law firms, for instance, have permitted women associates and partners to by-pass the normal intra-firm cross-marketing connectors (mainly male practice group leaders) and instead refer to the women in far-flung geographic regions who have gotten to know one anothers' specialty practices and strengths as advocates through monthly women initiative or women affinity group meetings.

If women -- the most collaborative gender, if I may be so bold -- don't refer, it's not because they don't want to.  It's because there are still too few of them in positions that permit them to refer.

The Professional Women's Network is out to change all that.  If you'd like to be part of Women 2.0, please consider joining the Professional Women's Networks of Southern or Northern Cailfornia today.  It's free; it's fun; and, it's powerful.

We refer!!

What does the 200-year present have to do with conflict resolution week?  It reminds us that new forms never really completely replace the old ones.  We continue to employ every technique we've ever used to suppress, avoid, deny, resolve, transform, or transcend conflict, including force (violent and non-violent such as injunctions subject of a Trial Warrior Blog post this week); thievery (the Trade Secrets Blog); shaming (which Scott Greenfield does to bloggers "looking for fights and dumb as dirt" and which Volokh suggests we do to health insurers); bullying (solutions to which appear at the Citizen Media Law Project); torture (still with us at the Crim Prof Blog); cheating (Make Yourself Better with Their Secrets at Concretely Ambiguous) ingratiation (at the Law School Expert); persuasive argumentation; appeal to third party authority; bargaining; communication; and, problem solving (The Tao of Advice at the Business of Creativity). 

Whichever dispute resolution mechanism you use, it should be much improved if you take up  juggling (as reported this week at Idealawg).

Transformative conflict resolution of the type covered by New York City police officer, Jeff Thompson at Enjoy Mediation, requires accountability (by lawyers, for instance, to the principle of justice at Law21); recognition (at JD Bliss); apology, amends, reconciliation (at Opinio Juris); power with (negotiation and cooperation at the Ohio Family Law Blog) instead of power over (at the Election Law Blog); and, interests rather than rights (at the Gay Couples Law Blog).

No brand of law-giver or enforcer has ever entirely left the scene.  Cops, negotiators, mediators (on the international scene at the Business Conflict Blog); conciliators, arbitrators, trial attorneys (marking tattoos as exhibits over at LawComix), corporate lawyers, legislators  (fomenting a Franken Amendment at the ADR Prof Blawg); judges (whether elected or appointed at Legally Unbound), and, juries (who might be biased at SCOTUS Blog). 

And of course the gadflies (wolf protection lawsuits anyone? at  Point of Law). 

Win, lose, settle, enjoin (at Charon QC) or simply give up (6 Ways We Gave Up Our Privacy at CSO Security and Risk).  We regulate crime and prescribe punishment (Polanski at Sentencing Law and Policy and The End of an Era at Defending People). 

We wage war (at Prawfs Blog) and seek peace (at the Delaware Employment Law Blog) as conflict inevitably erupts over Obama's (embarrassing) peace prize (at Balkinization).

And, lest we forget our primary purpose, we bend our efforts toward justice (which, according to BLT is not necessarily available to card-carrying members of the ACLU).

My own personal 200-year present spans the life of my maternal grandparents who were nine years old in 1909, and that of my step-children’s children, who (assuming they procreate on a reasonable schedule) should be ninety-five'ish in 2109. 

My grandfather, born in 1900, witnessed the birth of electricity, saw the first automobile roll off an assembly line ^[2] and stood awestruck in a cornfield as one of mankind’s first airplanes took flight. ^[3]  Although we've progressed from bi-planes to jets and rockets (some of which may someday be green) we still fly balloons of the type first launched in 1783 -- both Goodyear Blimps and the backyard variety, covered this week by Legal Blog Watch as Law and More

asked here whether the shiny, flying, silver Jiffy Pop-looking craft tethered in the backyard of Richard Heene was an "attractive nuisance" under the law.

Grandpa's first war was, well, the First and his second was the Second,^[4]  as if there'd never been any wars before the Great One. By the time I was born, mid-century, we'd fought the war to end all wars twice and knew we'd never survive a third. 

My imagined grandchildren, ^[6] born sometime between today and 2014, will not be strangers to any of my grandfather’s technologies. Despite the advent of compact fluorescent light bulbs, the early lives of my step-children's children will likely pass under the glow of the same incandescent lights that brightened granddad’s one-room school house. They will be transported to school in cars with internal combustion engines, learn the same alphabet from the same cardboard and paper books (as well as from the "e" variety) ^[7] and play many of the same games ^[8]  he did – hop scotch, jump rope and ring-around the rosy. 

Change will etch itself into the lives of my grandchildren as surely as it did my own, my parents' and my grandparents'.  Hybrids will give way to fully electric (and perhaps hemp-powered) ^[9] vehicles (effective or defective) and though electricity will continue to be  generated by hydroelectric dams, wind farms and nuclear power plants, some new and unimaginable source of power will surely push back the nights of my grand children's children. ^[10]

Law, politics, society and culture also exist in the 200-year present of conflict resolution.  ^[11] In my personal 200-year span, the law seems to have changed the most profoundly. Was it the law first and culture later?  Or do they weave our future together?

The first U.S. woman lawyer, Myra Bradwell, was admitted to practice a mere ten years before my grandmother was born. Mrs. Bradwell’s legal career was the subject of one of the sorriest U.S. Supreme Court decisions ever handed down, in which the Court opined,

The civil law as well as nature itself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender.  The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say the identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea for a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband … for these reasons I think that the laws of Illinois now complained of are not obnoxious to the charge of any abridging any of the privileges and immunities of cities of the United States.

^[12]

Another nineteen years would pass after Bradwell began her practice before she (and my nineteen year old grandmother) were guaranteed the right to vote. ^[13] And another 30 years would pass after my women's movement -- the Second Wave -- before we'd have our own  business magazine -   ForbesWoman (my part in it here).  And let us not forget that despite the 20th Century's great civil rights achievements, when America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia.  See e.g. Problems All Around for Blacks in Big Law at Being a Black Lawyer.

My grandparents', parents' and step-children's 20th Century was dominated by genocide ^[14] on a scale and a technological precision unimaginable to our earlier forebears.  Mid-century brought with it the threat of nuclear annihilation but also liberated millions of people enslaved by colonialism.  We cured polio in my own lifetime with both "dead" and "live" vaccines (neither of them counterfeit) - a singular moment in scientific history during which no one took ownership of the cure and no one tried to stop others from seeking another, a problem Patently O addressed this week in Reverse Payments.

Whether god or satan, heaven or hell, war or peace "won" the twentieth century, the world's greatest peace-making body was created during it -- the United Nations.  And here in the U.S., the “living room war,” Viet Nam, coupled with the largest generation of adolescents ever to grace American society, ended the forcible induction of young men into the military. ^[15]

With the recent discovery of our earliest ancestor, Ardi, our biological and social lives exist in a 4.4 million year now. Our physical bodies “evolve” in the womb along the same lines as did our species and, once born, we carry with us our earliest organs. ^[16] Most critical of these to conflict escalation and avoidance is our “fight-flight” mechanism – the amygdala.^[17] And the most pertinent biological agents to promote the collaborative resolution of conflict are our “mirror neurons” which

 provide a powerful biological foundation for the evolution of culture . . . absorb[ing] it directly, with each generation teaching the next by social sharing, imitation and observation.

 ^[18]

As “exquisitely social creatures,” our “survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others.” Id. That our misunderstandings and cognitive biases -- mentioned by Volokh on Paternalism and Michael Carbone on reactive devaluation at Mediation Strategies this week -- threaten our survival as a species is undeniable (cf. Lawyers Must Survive or Face Extinction at the Lawyerist). 

How we’ve manage to survive despite our tendency to misread one another’s actions, intentions and emotions, is often the subject of those who advise us how to choose and move juries -- here -- Anne Reed at Deliberations (explaining why "they" don't see things like "we" do here); and, the Jury Room (explaining why pain hurts more intensely when we believe it's been intentionally inflicted here). 

The Most Effective Conflict Resolution Technology is the Oldest

One of our true original gangsters, Al Capone, is reported to have said that “you can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone” and one of our greatest Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt said “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

Capone and Roosevelt didn't know it, but they were talking about the most effective (and most ancient) form of conflict resolution – tit for tat. In 1980, political Scientist Robert Axelrod asked game theory experts to submit computer programs designed to prevail in a game that provided the highest reward to cooperating pairs -- the famous Prisoner's Dilemma. (See also Max Kennerly's excellent post on Game Theory and Medical Malpractice Settlements at the Philadelphia Litigation and Trial Blog).

The winner of Axelrod's competition was a program named tit for tat.  Tit for tat was programmed to cooperate ^[19]  with its first encounter with any other programmed player.  It  rewarded cooperation with cooperation (just as networking will reward the savvy lawyer over at Chuck Newton's Ride the Third Wave) and punished non-cooperation with retaliation. Because Tit for Tat retaliated in the face of non-cooperation (just as a former employee did according to Hell Hath No Fury at Chicago Law Blogger) it was never repeatedly victimized. And because Tit for Tat “forgave” non-cooperators upon their return to cooperative game playing (as some believe Mr. Polanski should be forgiven over at the Marquette U. Law School Faculty Blog) it never got locked into mutually costly chains of mutual betrayal. ^[20]

As Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal explained, had Tit for Tat been tossed into the game with 50 steadfast non-cooperators, there would have been a 49-way tie for first place. But none of the players' programs failed to cooperate in at least some circumstances, leaving Tit for Tat the clear victor.  According to Wright, humans, like the programs in Axelrod's competition, are evolutionarily “designed” to cooperate under at least some circumstances. The engine and benefit of cooperation is present in our neurochemistry.  When scientists observed the brain activity of volunteers playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, for instance, they found that the participants' “reward circuits” were activated and their impulsive "me first" circuits inhibited when they cooperated. Cooperation, retaliation, forgiveness and a return to cooperation. Tit for Tat. 

Laws and Lawyers

First and most importantly, I suppose, are the social media signs that you're "tweeting" like a lawyer over at the Social Media Law Student Blog.  Why first or important?  Know thyself.  Everything else follows that.

We don't "dis" lawyers here at the Negotiation Blog.  We simply remind ourselves that our primary purpose is the promotion of justice, with a stable societal order closely behind.  Most people don't understand, for instance, that Shakespeare's famous the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers was not an insult.  In King Henry IV, Act IV, Scene II, Shakespeare's sentiment was not his own, but that of a revolutionary who wished to destroy the social order.

The historic "present" of laws and lawyers is in the thousands, not simply the hundreds, of years. Hammurabi (make of his choice for the memorialization of his laws what you will) was the sixth king of Babylon, remembered for creating -- in his own name (and likeness?) - the first written and systematic legal code. 

These laws provided for a mix of physical punishment - 60 lashes with an ox hide whip - ‘measure for measure’ awards (still with us in the form of lethal injection as covered by The StandDown Texas Project) – eye for eye, bone fracture for bone fracture – and monetary compensation – 20 shekels for tooth injuries – (preserved by workplace injury awards such as those discussed at the Workers Compensation Blog) depended not only upon the type of injury, but the social classes involved in the loss, i.e., ‘measure for measure’ sanctions were specified for losses among the upper classes while monetary awards were required for losses caused to and by commoners (reminding us that disrespect still too often turns on social status or "outsider" classification as discussed at Balkinization this week).  ^[23] 

For the wrongful killing of another, for instance, the victim’s kin were paid according to the social status of the deceased party. Thus the ‘man price’ for killing a peasant was 200 shillings and that for a nobleman 1200 shillings. Payments were not, however, tailored to the loss, but fixed according to types of affront, a distinction we continue to make when we punish intentional torts more severely than negligent ones.  ^[24]>

Criminal law and civil, it all comes down to a process that is "due" (a topic covered in a blistering post about tea-partiers and other "protectors" of the Constitution at the Criminal Jurisdiction Law Blog) and a set of guidelines against which we can exercise some small degree of control over our own commercial and personal futures (like those subject of Delays Not "Party Time, Excellent" for Subcontractor at the Construction Contract Review).

Lawyers, litigators and trial lawyers are too often demonized by the ADR community as if you could get someone to sit down to negotiate without first pointing the gun of litigation at their heads; I salute you (and myself, for that matter!) for bringing us all to the bargaining table.  See Steve Mehta's recent post at Mediation Matters, Factors When Peace Makes Sense for a note that touches upon the symbiotic relationship between litigation and mediation, litigators and mediators.

I shouldn't cite single legal blogs twice, but I cannot resist this quote of Scott Greenfield's on another pundit's view of the future lawyers have in store for them, i.e., 

shucking oysters for a living if we don't accept a future of lawyers being piece workers in factories, sending our work off to Bangalore in pdf files and complementing people on their choice of forms at Legal Zoom.

Legal Rebels:  the Sky is Falling at Simple Justice.  Charon QC also weighs in on the ABA Legal Rebels project here.

Arbitration

Which came first? Public civil trials or private arbitrations? You’ll be surprised, I’ll wager, to hear that arbitration was one of the earliest forms of dispute resolution, practiced by the juris consults of the Roman Empire. Roman arbitration predates the adversarial system of common law by more than a thousand years. ^[25]

Ah, the glory of Rome! The juris consulti were (like too many mediators) amateurs who dabbled in dispute resolution, raising the question whether they (and we) should be certified or regulated as Diane Levin asks at The Mediation Channel this week.  The Roman hobbyists gave legal opinions (responsa) to all comers (a practice known as publice respondere). They also served the needs of Roman judges and governors would routinely consult with advisory panels of jurisconsults before rendering decisions. Thus, the Romans – god bless them! - were the first to have a class of people who spent their days thinking about legal problems (an activity some readers will recall Ralph Nader calling "mental gymnastics in an iron cage").

18th Century Dispute Resolution Technology:  The (Inevitably Polarizing) Adversarial System

It was Buckminster Fuller who famously opined that the "significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."  If you keep this aphorism in mind for the remainder of this post, you'll likely have some extraordinarily innovative comments to make in the comment section below.

As the Law Guru wiki reminds us, we can trace the adversarial system to the "medieval mode of trial by combat, in which some litigants were allowed a champion to represent them."  We owe our present day adversarialism, however, to the common law's use of the jury - the power of argumentation replacing the power of the sword.

The Act abolishing the infamous Star Chamber in 1641 also granted every "freeman" the right to trial by "lawful judgment of his peers" or by the "law of the land" before the Crown could "take[] or imprison[]" him or "disseis[e] [him] of his freehold or liberties, or free customs."  Nor could he any longer be "outlawed or exciled or otherwise destroyed."  Nor could the King "pass upon him or condemn him." 

English colonies like our own adopted the jury trial system and we, of course, enshrined that system in the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments.  Whether this 17th century dispute resolution technology can be fine-tuned to keep abreast of 21st century dispute creation technology (particularly in the quickly moving area of intellectual property) remains one of the pressing questions of legal and ADR policy and practice, particularly in a week in which a Superior Court verbally punished the lawyers before it for filing The Most Oppressive Motion Ever Presented (see the Laconic Law Blog).  The motion? 

Defendants['] . . . motion for summary judgment/summary adjudication, seeking adjudication of 44 issues, most of which were not proper subjects of adjudication.  Defendants’ separate statement was 196 pages long, setting forth hundreds of facts, many of them not material—as defendants’ own papers conceded.  And the moving papers concluded with a request for judicial notice of 174 pages.  All told, defendants’ moving papers were 1056 pages.

Id. (and ouch!)  On a less Dickensian note (think Bleak House) take a look at the IP Maximizer's post on IP litigation not being smart source of revenue for inventors. 

Mediator, author and activist, Ken Cloke, suggests that interest-based resolutions to conflict must replace power and rights based resolutions if we expect to create a future in which justice prevails.  As Ken wrote in Conflict Revolution:

Approaching evil and injustice from an interest-based perspective means listening to the deeper truths that gave rise to them, extending compassion even to those who were responsible for evils or injustices, and seeking not merely to replace one evil or injustice with another, but to reduce their attractiveness by designing outcomes, processes, and relationships that encourage adversaries to work collaboratively to satisfy their interests.

Evil and injustice can therefore be considered byproducts of reliance on power or rights, and failures or refusals to learn and evolve.

All political systems generate chronic conflicts that reveal their internal weaknesses, external pressures, and demands for evolutionary change. Power- and rights-based systems are adversarial and unstable, and therefore avoid, deny, resist, and defend themselves against change. As a result, they suppress conflicts or treat them as purely interpersonal, leaving insiders less informed and able to adapt, and outsiders feeling they were treated unjustly and contemplating evil in response.

As pressures to change increase, these systems must either adapt, or turn reactionary and take a punitive, retaliatory attitude toward those seeking to promote change, delaying their own evolution. Only interest-based systems are fully able to seek out their weaknesses, proactively evolve, transform conflicts into sources of learning, and celebrate those who brought them to their attention.

These are the words I leave with the readers of Blawg Review #234 because they are the ones that informed my personal and professional transformation from a legal career based on rights and remedies to one based upon interests and consensus. 

Whatever my own personal 200-year present was, is and will be, it is pointed in the direction of peace with justice, with an enormous and probably unwarranted optimism best expressed by the man after whom my law school was named:  Martin Luther King, Jr.  - the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.

Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues. Next week's host, Counsel to Counsel, will devote its round-up of the week's best legal posts to the Great Recession.

The response was unanimous from this well-run Fortune 500 Company:  fix our relationship with the __________ Department:  it chronically undermines our negotiations with outsiders.  The  _________ Department was the only one sending none of its people to the two-day negotiation training.  An executive friend of mine said, "that's not surprising - no one can see a black hole."

This month's Harvard Business Review sees the black hole in every negotiation team in its September '09 must-read article, How to Manage Your Negotiating Team by Jeanne M. Brett, Ray Friedman, and  Kristin Behfar.

Despite the _________ Department's absence, I created groups of in-house attendees who represented each internal department and asked them to generate a list of the interests of their negotiating teams, including the _________ department, which is one of the recommendations made by Brett, Friedman and Behfar.

There's an executive summary at the link above but I'd shell out the money for a copy of the print magazine to have the full text of this article.  Here are the recommendations of the experts:

• Plot out the conflicts
• Work with constituents
• Mediate conflicts of interest
• Persuade with data
• simulate the negotiation
• assign roles to capitalize on team members strengths and interests
• establish a plan for intrateam communication

I'll write a post a day about each of these strategies when I return from vacation.  In the meantime, litigators who work with teams inside the firm; who defend complex litigation with joint defense groups; and, who must bargain with others with very different interests (construction litigation comes to mind) should be thinking of the ways in which integrated negotiation planning could maximize the settlement benefits to be gained by strategic partners.

A friend recently reminded me of a book review I wrote for one of those "get rich" books The Go Giver (below) for the sorely-missed Complete Lawyer.   I reprint it here in the Negotiation Blog because I talk a lot about the power of reciprocity in bargaining.  I'd summarize my response here, but I can't say it any better than I did below. 

The Go-Giver, A Guide to a Life Lived Richly

American business people have been writing self-help guides to financial success since Benjamin Franklin penned Advice to a Young Tradesman and Poor Richard’s Almanac. Business consultants Bob Burg and John Davis Mann add to this tradition a new parable -- The Go-Giver, A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea.              

As the title suggests, Burg and Mann recommend that we discard “go getting” -- hard work focused on individual success -- in favor of “go giving” – authentically passionate work focused on the success of others. To demonstrate how material wealth follows generous action, Burg and Mann create an elusive but legendary business consultant “Pindar,” who shares his Five Laws of Stratospheric Success with anyone who promises to practice these principles in all their affairs.    

The pilgrim in this progress is “Joe,” an earnest and hard-working salesman on the brink of a third failed quarter. After promising to follow the laws Pindar teaches him, Joe meets a handful of spectacularly successful givers. These include former hot dog vendor Ernesto, who credits his restaurant and real estate empire to giving more than you take; Nicole, who owes her rise from school teacher to educational software titan to giving much to many; former insurance salesman Sam, whose many philanthropies thrive on giving without expectation of return; and, Debra, who learns to succeed in business by giving of her true self. Having quickly learned each lesson, Joe himself exemplifies Law No. 5 – the willingness to receive the bounty that flows from giving.  

Unfortunately, as a guide to financial success, The Go-Giver is more fairy tale than instruction manual. All of the business icons Joe visits ascribe their riches to acts of authentic generosity. It is apparent from the context in which these stories arise, however, that the key here is neither virtue nor the inherent satisfaction to be found in giving. The key is choosing the right people to give to – those with wealth, monied connections or the power to create economic opportunities for others.   

If we are moved to visit shut-ins; bring recovery meetings to incarcerated felons; or make micro-loans to third-world entrepreneurs, this book is not for us. This is focused giving and the focus is on the “haves,” not the “have nots.”  If we are among the unemployed; the sick; or, the elderly, we’ll need another set   of “Laws” for success  – chief among them laws guaranteeing the education; training; and, health care necessary to enable us to make use of the opportunities created by the Go-Givers’ generosity.  [1]

Walking the Razor’s Edge

Most Complete Lawyer readers are, however, the type of business people for whom The Go-Giver is written.   No matter where we appear on the legal economic ladder, as educated people with access to the justice system, we are well poised to engage in random acts of kindness for, and reap rewards from, those who are well situated to spread a little green.  [2]   So long as we successfully negotiate the razor’s edge between opportunism and genuine acts of generosity, Burg and Mann’s advice will likely redound not only to our emotional and spiritual well-being, but also to our financial success.    

Most readers will, of course, recognize Joe’s spectacular rise from failing salesman to coffee-bean multi-millionaire as the fairy tale the The Go-Giver all but announces itself to be. There is value here, however, in the quotidian acts of kindness in which Joe engages to satisfy Pindar’s requirement that he promptly practice the “Laws” conveyed.     

The most credible results of Joe’s baby steps on the road to becoming a generous human being are his improved relationships with his fellows. Practicing “not keeping track,” Joe foregoes telling his wife his own work-a-day worries, focusing his entire attention upon the challenges of her day. His reward? An entirely believable note of love and gratitude on her pillow the following morning. Practicing “giving more value” than he receives, Joe serves coffee to his workmates as they struggle to meet a collective quarter-end deadline. Though Joe reports “feeling like an idiot” in doing so, it is clear that the warmth and bemused surprise expressed by is co-workers is its own reward.     

The true lesson of The Go-Giver is not so much that material reward follows an expansive spirit, but that one’s daily pleasure increases with the size of one’s own heart. After all, when financial success eludes us – or crashes with the national economy – what we have to rely upon is not numbers on a ledger sheet, but the family, friends and neighbors who will see us through. If we give authentically without expectation of reward – because we “love to . . . as a way of life” – what we will reap is a life richly lived even if we do not thereby “get rich” in the process.

Connecting for Job Help

By Barbara Rose

Gwynne Monahan is not a lawyer, but she knows what it’s like to lose a job. So the Twitter thread she spotted in May about lawyer layoffs caught her attention. “Wondering why laid-off attorneys don’t band together and start a new law firm,” a lawyer tweeted.

Attorney Victoria Pynchon asked if someone would use Ning, the social networking platform, to start a site where lawyers could help one another weather the downturn. Monahan jumped on the idea because she wanted to learn Ning. Ten minutes later, she tweeted, “@vpynchon asked if anyone wanted to create a Ning site, and so I did, and here it is: Lawyer Connection.”

And so was born one of the newest of the networking sites that are proliferating in a de­pressed economy amid a social media explosion. Within a month, Lawyer Connection had grown to 49 members (and counting) from California to New York. They range from unemployed to established attorneys of all stripes, including lawyers with nontraditional careers. The site features job leads, events, members’ blog feeds and discussion forums. Pynchon was actively recruiting experienced attorneys for a mentoring forum in June. “Now is the time for every­body to be supporting everybody else,” says Pynchon, a mediator of complex commercial litigation for ADR Services Inc. in Los Angeles and author of the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog.

“The idea of putting together seasoned attorneys with young people who are experiencing the harshness of failure for the first time in their lives is an idea whose time has come,” she adds. “Especially lawyers who went to good schools and expected to have careers in big firms. I don’t think they’ve seen themselves as someone who may need to hang out a shingle and practice law in a downturn.”

Continue reading here (scroll down to second article)

Come join us at Lawyer Connectionwhether you are a seasoned legal professional with decades of experience to share with your younger colleagues or you are a young, new or laid off attorney searching for guidance.

The network is what we make of it together.

I have to say that I agree with magazine mogul Tina Brown that we're in a "gig economy" not a job economy.  What does that mean?  It means doing an inventory of your dreams right next to a realistic assessment of your skills, along with a time line for getting your own business up and running, with or without investors, remembering that in a "gig economy" barter is a perfectly acceptable alternative to cash and in the age of the internet (Networking Wisdom in Mentoring Circles) hundreds of marketing tools that can reach millions of people globally and thousands of people locally, are right beneath your fingers on the keyboard connected to the computer that brings you the most exciting set of opportunities since we decided to send men to the moon -- social networking (now there's a proper run-on sentence, the reward for which is buying myself a new copy of Elements of Style which every job-seeker and new entrepreneur should do post-haste since written communication is the key to successful online business development). 

That said, for those who NEED A JOB RIGHT NOW to pay off their law school loans (remembering that dischargable or not, we no longer have debtors' prisons), here's today's Law.com advice:

The book gives a 12-step plan for landing a new job: 1. finding passion and creating vision; 2. creating a brand; 3. creating a value proposition; 4. creating stories; 5. developing a marketing plan; 6. getting a message out; 7. creating a marketing document; 8. meeting the friend's friend; 9. power résumé; 10. preparing for an interview; 11. negotiating terms; 12. landing the job; and the next step.

The book emphasizes the importance of keeping up contacts after landing in a new job -- knowing that another may search may be ahead. But it suggests maintaining contacts by looking for ways to help other people with a "pay-it-forward" approach. "We all need help at some point," the book says. "The concept is that you are thankful for those who helped you in the past."

Villwock told the group that in his experience, the most successful CEOs and other professionals are those who are most passionate about their work. "When they stop having fun, that's when they stop and go on to the next job," he said.

He also advised the group that attitude and personal skills are as important as professional credentials. From observing executives, he said, "half their success has nothing to do with performance on the job. It has everything to do with ability to sell themselves and build trusted relationships."

If you substitute business plan for power résumé and starting the business for landing the job, you've got a perfectly great recipe for engaging the gig economy eagerly awaiting your contribution.  Listen up!  You didn't get the highest PSAT and SAT scores, graduate cum, magna or summa, ace the LSAT, study your $#@% off, learn lawyering skills, conquer your fear and pass the bar exam to be hat in hand looking to be someone's apprentice galley slave. 

Think about it and join the rest of the gig economy. 

We're looking forward to your unique and valuable contributions to the new economy right now!

The writing on the inside of the secret entrepreneurial decoder ring?  MONETIZE EVERYTHING!

AND WOMEN!!  JOIN THE PROFESSIONAL WOMEN'S NETWORK OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.  WE'RE ONLINE NATIONALLY AND "ON THE GROUND" LOCALLY.