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A Negotiation Exercise for Your Legal Skills (or Contracts) Course

A Negotiation Exercise for Your Legal Skills (or Contracts) Course

By Sandra Simpson

By George J. Siedel, University of Michigan

An ABA Business Law Section task force recently completed a landmark report titled “Defining Key Competencies for Business Lawyers” that was published in 2017 in The Business Lawyer (Winter 2016/2017).  The report drew on the framework of the ABA MacCrate Report (“Legal Education and Professional Development–An Educational Continuum”), and is directed toward law schools and law firms.

Both reports emphasize the importance of negotiation as a key lawyering skill.  As the MacCrate report notes, “the skill of negotiation is a fundamental part of legal practice….”  The reports also discusses the analytical skills that lawyers must have when participating in negotiations.  The MacCrate report, for example, emphasizes that all lawyers must be able to (1) determine the bottom line; (2) evaluate alternatives; (3) identify outcomes from the negotiation; (4) analyze whether the negotiation is zero-sum, non-zero-sum, or a mixture of the two; and (5) examine the negotiation from the perspective of the other side.

A Free Teaching Package to Develop Negotiation Skills

I have developed a free teaching package that can be used by professors who want to introduce these skills in their courses.  The package includes a negotiation exercise with two roles, a Teaching Note, and Powerpoint slides.  The package could be used in a legal skills development course, in a legal writing program that includes negotiation, or (because the exercise is a contract negotiation) in the first-year Contracts course.  Here is a link to the package:

https://umich.box.com/s/ewycm8d4vedns15hj7m68oxfx4yu2qvz

The exercise, titled “The House on Elm Street,” involves a transaction that everyone can relate to—the sale of a house.  The twist in the exercise is that, unknown to the seller, the buyer is a secret agent representing a company that wants to demolish the house.  Students receive a short (two-page) role as either the buyer or seller, and they negotiate for 30 minutes, followed by an instructor-led debriefing.

The exercise is designed to achieve several learning goals that include the analytical skills mentioned in the two ABA reports.  Students will learn how to:

  1. understand the different types of negotiations;
  2. prepare for negotiations using a negotiation analysis that includes a reservation price, most likely outcome, stretch goal, and zone of potential agreement;
  3. recognize and decide ethical issues, using law-based standards (fraud, fiduciary duty, and unconscionability) and general ethical standards;
  4. develop and use their negotiating power through the concept of BATNA (“best alternative to a negotiated agreement”);
  5. apply contract and agency law concepts to negotiations; and
  6. create value in a manner that benefits both sides.

The Teaching Note is divided into three sections.  Section I explains how to set up the negotiation exercise.  Section II provides a script, with slides, for debriefing the exercise.  Section III discusses a document titled “Self-Assessment and Feedback for the Other Side” that is appended to the Teaching Note.  Students can use this document to evaluate their negotiation skills and develop a plan for skill improvement.  In law school courses where legal skills are taught within a legal writing course, the evaluation and plan could be used as a writing assignment.

Feedback from Participants

I have used this exercise in degree courses and in executive seminars in North America, South America, Asia and Europe.  In addition to law students, attorneys and judges, other participants in the courses and seminars include athletic directors, engineers, entrepreneurs, managers, and physicians.  Organizations in the public sector (for example, the World Bank) and private sector (one of the five largest U.S. companies) have used the exercise for negotiation training led by in-house staff.

Feedback on the exercise has been positive.  Here is a comment on the debriefing experience and the plan for improving negotiation skills.

What a great learning experience! [T]he ability to get feedback and actually debrief a negotiation is really powerful!  I considered myself rather self-actualized, but some interesting things came to light in the class discussions.  I know that if I make a concerted effort to work on [my plan for skill improvement] it will certainly serve me well in my career—both now and in the future.

I have also received considerable feedback regarding the impact of the learning from the exercise.  Here is a comment from a participant who used a planning checklist based on skills covered in the exercise.

I received a quote from a key supplier a few weeks back that was very good and I was just going to accept it as is. [But first I decided to complete the] planning checklist and called in the supplier. We had a great meeting, expanded the pie, learned tons about what each other wanted. In the end we renegotiated everything, set up yearly pricing reductions and a 2 tier pricing schedule that allows me to cover depreciation expenses on any expansion and provides my supplier the long term commitment from me he wanted.  Win-Win. The projected savings over the next 5 years is over $4M ….

If you decide to use the exercise, I would appreciate your comments and recommendations for improvement of the materials.  Thank you.

__________________________

George J. Siedel is the Thurnau Professor of Business Law and the Williamson Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan.  He can be contacted at gsiedel@umich.edu.

 

How You and Your Students Can Benefit From Stone Soup Next Year

How You and Your Students Can Benefit From Stone Soup Next Year

By Sandra Simpson

By John M. Lande, University of Missouri School of Law

The University of Missouri Law School started the Stone Soup Project about a year ago to incorporate more knowledge about actual practice in legal education.

Stone Soup contributes to a more balanced educational diet, adding context of disputes and more focus on parties.  Readings on legal doctrine generally are extremely acontextual.  Of course, students get value in reading excerpts of appellate case reports to learn about legal doctrine and analysis.  Similarly, students get value in reading about practice theory.

But I think that most law students get too little education about how cases actually look to lawyers.  In real life, cases are full of facts, evidence, uncertainty, risk analysis, interests, relationships, and emotions, which provide context that is systematically stripped out of most of our teaching materials.

And parties – central characters in lawyers’ work – typically are portrayed as cardboard figures who are included merely to demonstrate our teachings, not as the principals, who lawyers serve.

Readers of this blog know this.  People – maybe including you – have been saying this for a long, long time.  Indeed, this has been a major motivation for clinical and some other instruction.

Stone Soup is another systematic effort to provide a more balanced educational diet for students by including more of these perspectives in our teaching.

How Stone Soup Works

Since we started the Project about a year ago, we have engaged almost 1000 students in 40 classes covering 12 subjects, taught by 32 faculty from 25 schools in 3 countries.

Faculty generally have assigned students to conduct interviews about actual cases and/or practitioners’ backgrounds, philosophies, and practices.  Some faculty assigned students to observe court proceedings or mediations.  You can tailor an assignment to fit your educational objectives.

Most assignments were in traditional ADR courses, but faculty also used Stone Soup assignments in other courses including Access to Justice, Evidence, Relational Lawyering, Resolving Community Civil Rights Disputes, and Trusts and Estates.  Faculty could use them in almost any course, such as Labor Law, Employment Discrimination, Professional Responsibility, Civil Procedure, and Criminal Law, among many others.

Stone Soup faculty assessed their courses, identifying what worked well, what students learned that they would not have learned without the assignment, and what faculty would do differently in the future.  Here’s a collection of their assessments.

Faculty consistently reported outstanding results that far exceeded our expectations.  Stone Soup has provided many benefits including:

  • increasing students’ exposure to the real world of practice
  • helping students develop critically-important interviewing and analysis skills
  • identifying how theory does and doesn’t map well onto actual practice
  • supplementing faculty’s knowledge, especially for faculty who haven’t practiced in the subjects they are teaching – or haven’t practiced at all
  • increasing students’ and faculty’s enjoyment of the courses

Faculty who used Stone Soup assignments in their courses this year generally plan to use Stone Soup again with little or no change.

How You Can Use Stone Soup

The initial experiences yield some general suggestions for using Stone Soup.  In particular, faculty should require students to complete interviews or observations as soon as appropriate in a course, and should schedule time in class to discuss what students learned.  Discussing insights from these assignments early in a semester provides a base of experience that everyone can refer to during the rest of the course.

Here’s a table identifying characteristics of Stone Soup courses and including links to faculty assessments of the courses.  The table demonstrates the incredible creativity of faculty in tailoring assignments to fit their instructional goals and circumstances.  For each course, it shows:

  • Class size
  • Description of the Stone Soup assignment
  • Whether the assignment was required, one option of an assignment, or extra credit
  • Assigned paper length
  • Due date
  • Percentage of grade, if any
  • Whether the results of the assignment were discussed in class

Some faculty like the Stone Soup idea generally but wonder if it work in their courses or feel hesitant for other reasons.  This post identifies some colleagues’ concerns and responses to those concerns.  In particular, the assignments need not add much, if any, workload, students generally can find interview subjects without faculty assistance, and Stone Soup can work well in almost any law school course.

If you would like more information, you can read this report on the Project’s first year and/or get in touch with me.

If you would like to join the roster of colleagues using a Stone Soup assignment next year, please let me know the courses(s) and semester(s) in which you would use it.

Institute for Law Teaching and Learning