On June 9, 2010, Don Philbin will be giving a presentation entitled “Deal or No Deal — Negotiation Strategy in Mediations,” as part of a Securities Arbitration & Mediation CLE program sponsored by the City Bar Center for CLE and other organizations.  (The program agenda is here.)  The program will be held at 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. on June 9, 2010 at the New York City Bar (formerly “The Association of the Bar of the City of New York”), 42 West 44th Street, New York, New York 10036.   A one-hour networking lunch follows, beginning at 12:00 noon.  The program offers California, New York and Illinois CLE credit.  For information about fees and registration, click here or call the New York City Bar at (212) 382-6663.  

Don is an excellent speaker and has a unique, brain-science-oriented approach to negotiation and mediation.  He is also a very experienced arbitrator, mediator, attorney and consultant, whose many contributions to the ADR world include the ADR Highlight Reel (read about it here).   You can read about one of his prior presentations here, and his Forum guest post here and here. 

On June 10, 2010 Victoria Pynchon, along with John W. Tinghitella, is hosting a Negotiation for Women Workshop to be held in Pasedena, California.   The promotional materials for Vickie’s workshop point out some troubling statistics: 

1. Women are 4 times less likely to negotiate their salaries after college and they lose up to a million dollars over their careers as a result
2. Women own and manage 40% of all small businesses in the U.S., but obtain only 2 ½% of available venture capital
3. Women continue to earn 77 cents on every male dollar. Professional women earn even less – women attorneys, for instance, earn only 60 cents on the male lawyer’s dollar

The workshop is designed to give women “the insight and tools to recognize your existing skills and seize the opportunities you’re now overlooking.  This will allow you to negotiate better working conditions, higher salaries, more benefits and better prices for your products and services.” 

For more information about Victoria’s workshop, including registration instructions, click here.  And you can read her recent blog post about the workshop, “Closing the Wage Gap Rocking Your World,” here.

This program comes highly recommended for women young and old, professional and nonprofessional.  Negotiation is a critical part of all of our day-to-day lives and anything that can make us better at it is a worthwhile endeavor.  And Vickie and John Tinghitella are recognized and respected authorities on the subject.

In fact, the program is of such practical value that I recommended it to one of my California-based sisters who lives within a reasonable driving distance of Pasadena.

When I read John’s draft the first thing that struck me was that the rules and tips he offers are, for all intents and purposes, applicable to cedents pursuing reinsurance recoveries.  He stresses, among other things, the importance of honesty, good faith, open communication and not colluding with the claimant in an effort to obtain coverage.  These attributes are ones to which diligent, ceded claims personnel should aspire in their dealings with their company’s reinsurers, because they tend to increase the odds of achieving a successful recovery and avoiding time-consuming and expensive reinsurance disputes (all other things being equal). 

John was also kind enough to quote my comments in his article, which are reproduced below: 

As I discussed these rules with Philip J. Loree Jr. at the Loree Reinsurance and Arbitration Law Forum the other day, I learned that they don’t only apply to policyholders –  apparently insurers must live by these same rules to collect from their reinsurers:

You would be surprised how frequently reinsurers contend that the carrier colluded with the policyholder in direct insurance coverage litigation.  If the reinsurer can establish collusion concerning the fact, amount or allocation of coverage, or if the reinsurer otherwise shows that the carrier acted in bad faith, then the reinsurer will usually be relieved of liability for the claim.  Like policyholders making direct insurance claims, carriers making reinsurance claims need to avoid even the appearance of collusion or bad faith, and following rules analogous to yours helps them do that.

Whether you happen to be a corporate or individual policyholder, or a cedent wishing to increase the odds of successfully collecting from reinsurers, John’s fine article comes highly recommended.   In fact if you are at all interested in settlement and ADR, we highly recommend that you follow Settlement Perspectives.  John writes high-quality, insightful and practical  articles on a variety of pertinent topics.  Who could ask for more?

On May 21, 2009 Disputing and the Loree Reinsurance and Arbitration Law Forum announced the formation of the LinkedIn Commercial and Industry Arbitration and Mediation Group (post available here), an open forum for the discussion of industry and commercial ADR.   At that time the group was 29 members strong, and we are pleased to report that the group has since grown to 404 members.  And about 150 of those new members have joined since August 29, 2009. 

Discussions have been lively, the group is internationally and professionally diverse, and group members have access to several ADR blogs, as well as articles posted by other group members.  It is an excellent networking and learning opportunity for anyone interested in commercial and industry ADR.

The group recently set up a subgroup — the Effective Negotiation and Settlement Subgroup — which is now more than 90 members strong.  This subgroup, founded by California mediator, arbitrator and blogger Michael P. Carbone, focuses on identifying and discussing the effective negotiation, mediation and settlement of disputes that are the subject of pending arbitration or litigation proceedings.  Membership in the main group is the only prerequisite to participate in the subgroup.   

Membership in the group is recommended to those interested in keeping abreast of current events pertinent to arbitration (including consumer arbitration), tracking judicial and legislative developments relevant to arbitration law, learning more about the subject, or simply sharing information.  We are proud to have as members a number of commercial and industry arbitrators, attorneys, law professors, industry people and arbitration professionals.   

Membership is also recommended if you are a mediator, a business person who utilizes mediation to resolve disputes, an attorney who represent clients in mediation or a person interested in learning about mediation or sharing information on the subject.  The group is proud to have as members a number of accomplished mediators, including some well-known ADR bloggers.  Not being a mediator myself, I have learned much about mediation simply through group participation.    

We welcome new members.  The group is not a forum for, and does not permit, advertising or blatant self-promotion, so our members need not be concerned about being subject to sales pitches, and the like. 

If you are already a member of LinkedIn, please click here to apply for membership in the Group. If you are not a LinkedIn member, click here, and you will be guided through the process of creating a profile (which does not need to be completed in one step).  Once your profile is started, and you have a log-in name and password, you can apply for membership in the Group (which entails no more than clicking on a button).  Joining LinkedIn is free, as is joining the group.

We hope you’ll join us and participate!

As readers may know, Don is an arbitrator, mediator, negotiator, AV-rated attorney, and business consultant, whose website is here.  He is an experienced commercial litigator, and was general counsel and president of hundred-million dollar plus communications- and technology-related companies.   He is listed in The Best Lawyers in America (Alternative Dispute Resolution; Woodward/White 2007, 2008).  In addition to his other work Don frequently writes and speaks on topics pertinent to ADR, and is an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University Law School’s prestigious Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution.  He serves as a co-manager of LinkedIn’s Commercial and Industry Arbitration and Mediation Group (here), and tweets about ADR-related topics on Twitter (follow Don here).   Don can be contacted here.  

Don was kind enough to send us a post on one of his favorite topics: brain science and its relevance to negotiation.  His post briefly describes a seminar on this subject, which he attended the weekend before last, and which he found particularly compelling.   Read about it here.

Psychology has informed negotiation theory for years. (See here.)  As a result, we know that all negotiators:

1. Are overconfident – we all live in Lake Wobegon where the grass is greener and everyone is above-average;
2. Reactively devalue offers coming from an adverse party – even if they happen to be in our interest (“it can’t be good for us if it came from them”); and
3. Have different risk tolerances – and react differently to the same offer.

But faster magnetic resonance imaging (“MRI”) machines have allowed brain scientists to monitor a subject’s reactions to different stimuli in real time.  That has accelerated the pace of discovery and expanded research frontiers.  Vanderbilt Law School, for instance, has received grants to investigate how insights of brain research affect the legal system.  (See here.)  When used in an effort to prove guilt or innocence, there is inevitable controversy.  But learning how the human brain often functions can be good training for negotiators and the mediators that often assist them.

I have long been interested in the ways economics and psychology can broaden the typical legal analysis in mediation.  The ABA recently published “How Brain Science can Make You a Better Lawyer” (here), a broad survey, but not particularly insightful negotiation theory.  So I took a course titled, “Neuro-Collaboration: How New Perspectives from the Neurosciences Can Enhance Your Collaborative Conflict Resolution Skills” (here) the weekend before last in beautiful Woodstock, Vermont (yes, the leaves were still changing). 

Because it was offered by the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine Law School (here) (the number one program in dispute resolution for at least five-years running), I had high expectations.  I had heard that the psychiatrist who co-taught the course – a clinical professor from UC San Francisco whom the Washington Post described as “a rare example of the fusing of scientific rigor with literary eloquence” – could make the concepts accessible to those not trained as physicians.  And he did. 

With the help of acclaimed legal trainer Pauline Tesler, Tom Lewis dispelled many of the common assumptions we make about how other people view a problem, and then constructed a framework of reference to help us understand and accommodate those hardwired responses in our work.  He covered how metaphorical processes can help us manage conflict and facilitate resolution.  I was riveted as he addressed what we could learn from neuroeconomics about “getting to the deal” and how the incumbent emotions and other non-rational factors could help us support constructive conflict resolution.

Tom deconstructs the human brain into its pieces.  The “reptile brain” near the stem that coordinates life functions and responds to rewards – money, power, position, etc.  He then stacks the moderating function of the limbic arc on top of that primitive but very useful core.  The limbic area makes us social mammals – seeking community and often moderating the go-it-alone impulses of the reptile brain.  Then he gets to the cortex that defines us as humans.  There we become ultra-social and collaborate to the point that we dominate and, at the same time, can use the products of those collaborative efforts to destroy ourselves.  Functional magnetic resonance imaging (“fMRI”) measures the responses in each of these areas to a variety of stimuli – like competitive or collaborative negotiating strategies – to track patterns under different conditions.

It is as intense as it sounds, but Tom works in clever video clips to keep his audience from glazing over.  Pauline sparked a lot of discussion from the class, most of whom knew the subject at some depth from their varied professional experiences in the mediation ring.  It was another step toward appreciating why people do what they do in negotiations, and in my own quest to be better able to anticipate and respond to those often predictable moves.

I will continue to be a student of this area and I hope to take other courses from Tom as it continues to expand at an accelerating pace.