{"id":12,"date":"2007-02-22T15:36:19","date_gmt":"2007-02-22T19:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/pon1\/2007\/02\/22\/a-different-kind-of-negotiation\/"},"modified":"2007-02-22T15:38:50","modified_gmt":"2007-02-22T19:38:50","slug":"a-different-kind-of-negotiation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/2007\/02\/22\/a-different-kind-of-negotiation\/","title":{"rendered":"A different kind of negotiation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I took part in another role-play for the Negotiation Workshop.\u00a0 Without giving too many of the details away, I represented a man who had broken his neck using a Super Slipster, a water toy designed for children.\u00a0 This man, Adam, sued the company that manufactured the toy for $13 million in damages.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

What made this negotiation feel so different than the ones I\u2019ve done before was the simple fact that it was so numbers-intensive.\u00a0 In \u201cSally Soprano,\u201d price was definitely a factor, but the larger issues to resolve were Sally\u2019s publicity and future career prospects.\u00a0 And in my very first negotiation, in which I represented a filmmaker in a dispute with her producer, money was hardly an issue at all; the dispute was mostly about exercise of authority.\u00a0 But in yesterday\u2019s case, while non-tangible underlying interests were present in the background, the negotiation definitely centered around putting price tags on these interests.\u00a0 For me, it\u2019s much easier to identify common ground and create value when prices aren\u2019t an issue.\u00a0 Yesterday, the numbers felt like a frustrating distraction from what I saw as the real substance:\u00a0 Adam\u2019s disability and the devastating effect it had on his life.
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As a result of all this, during the actual negotiation I all too often tended to stick with positions, rather than interests.\u00a0 Having the numbers ever-present on the table made it easy to get bogged down in the math, and to anchor to one figure or another.\u00a0 And when we as lawyers are only authorized to agree to a certain minimum settlement, this number feels like a shadow looming over the rest of the negotiation.\u00a0
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Unfortunately, I\u2019m guessing that in most negotiations, prices and money will be an associated, if not central, concern.\u00a0 Particularly in a legal context, my impression is that monetary settlements dominate the negotiation landscape.\u00a0 But maybe I just watch way too much Law and Order.
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Looking back on the negotiation last night, I began to realize the effects of focusing so much on money and letting the larger interests fade into the background.\u00a0 While I think our settlement did address Adam\u2019s interests \u2013 he got enough money to pay his medical expenses and protect his family, and the product was taken off the market \u2013 I found myself facing what\u2019s rapidly becoming a familiar refrain for me:\u00a0 I could have gotten a better deal!\u00a0 Before negotiating, I tried to think about creative options relating to the money \u2013 but I completely missed the opportunity to create non-monetary value, perhaps because I was just so focused on agreeing to a certain price.\u00a0
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I think it will be a challenge for me in money-based negotiations to apply my skills in the same way as in other situations.\u00a0 I guess the lesson is that when underlying interests are present (as they almost always are), there are more ways to satisfy them than simply obtaining a large sum of money.\u00a0 This sounds completely obvious!\u00a0 But I\u2019m rapidly discovering that in the heat of a negotiation, it\u2019s very, very easy to miss the obvious.\u00a0
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Yesterday I took part in another role-play for the Negotiation Workshop.\u00a0 Without giving too many of the details away, I represented a man who had broken his neck using a Super Slipster, a water toy designed for children.\u00a0 This man, Adam, sued the company that manufactured the toy for $13 million in damages. What made […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":920,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1287],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pon-intern"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/920"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}