Judging The ABA Law Student Negotiation Competition

This past Saturday, I had the opportunity to judge Region 4 of the ABA Law Student Negotiation Competition, which included law students from Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Puerto Rico. This was my first time participating in one of these events. As I never participated in Moot Court, Mock Trial or any of the other competitions they had when I was in law school, I was unsure what to expect. Suffice it say I was duly impressed with the entire operation.

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Interesting Discussion on Anchoring over at Settle It Now.

The day before I posted about Professor Guthrie’s CLE presentation on The Psychology of Negotiation and Influence, Vickie Pynchon posted Insights from Social Psychology to Help You “Win” Your Next Negotiation.

When Michael Webster of the BizOp News blog commented about the efficacy of anchoring, Vickie posted a response entitled Aggressive First Offers which spawned an interesting discussion.

As it turns out, my lovely wife uses anchoring and aggressive first offers in her business all the time, so we were able to provide real-world examples of the usefulness of this tactic. Head over to Vickie’s blog to read all the comments or click Read On to read my wife’s comments on anchoring.

Georgia Bar ADR Conference – The Psychology of Negotiation and Influence

As I mentioned yesterday, this past Friday I attended the Georgia Bar’s 14th Annual ADR Institute and Neutral’s Conference. The penultimate and most interesting presentation of the day was given by Vanderbilt Law professor Chris Guthrie entitled “The Psychology of Negotiation and Influence.” Professor Guthrie’s biography describes him as “a leading scholar in the areas of dispute resolution and decision-making” with research interests in “Behavioral law and economics; dispute resolution; negotiation; mediation; [and] judicial decision making.”

His presentation (which I hope to receive shortly in PowerPoint form) discussed several key concepts with which every negotiator and mediator hopefully should be familiar: Anchoring, Exchange, and Evaluation. Like me, I would venture to guess most are familiar with these concepts, even if unfamiliar with the technical terms and descriptions.

More after the jump