Negotiation Committee (Dispute Resolution)

The recently formed Negotiation Committee, now co-chaired by Norman Solovay and Richard I. Janvey, is working with its members to extract topics from the broad range of its subject matter that will be of particular interest and relevance to our fellow ADR practitioners as well as to other lawyers with whom we all deal.

The Committee recently sponsored a very well-received program by Pauline Tesler, a leading promoter of Collaborative Law, now at least as well known for her pointing out and dealing with how the continuing flood of neuroscience discoveries has been drastically altering prior assumptions about best negotiation and other settlement practices. A major current focus of the Committee is following up on Pauline’s revelations and being a leading voice in keeping up with and informing our ADR colleagues and others about past and continuing developments in neuroscience and their applicability to our work.

Some of the other negotiation topics presently under consideration for possible articles, programs and exercises include but are no means limited to:

• ways to utilize negotiation to suggest the use of mediation without its being taken, as now frequently happens, as a sign of weakness of one’s case;
• what kind of negotiated assistance can be given to cure the all too frequent inability to successfully pass down family businesses from one generation to the next;
• the complications that both cultural and intergenerational differences bring to negotiations and how to deal with them singly or in combination;
• how would we improve the mediation rules recently adapted by the ICC and the AAA;
• when and why negotiation and mediation may not be appropriate; and
• discussion of new texts, research and articles of particular interest to negotiators in all disciplines.

We are pleased to say that our Committee has been attracting a growing, interesting and diverse membership and we look forward to its continued growth and to working closely with other Committees of our Dispute Resolution Section.