Learn To Negotiate Like A Transactional Lawyer

I recently had lunch with  Mark Fingerman, a Los Angeles lawyer who has successfully transitioned from being a litigator to a full-time mediator. As I often do, when I get an opportunity to talk shop with mediators, I asked Mark some of his tips for successful negotiation. To my surprise, although Mark had been a litigator his entire career, his advice was to go a different direction entirely. “Litigators can increase the likelihood of success at mediation,” he said, “by acting more like transactional lawyers.”

This notion immediately made a lot of sense. After all, while it’s the mission of a transactional lawyer to get the best possible deal and terms for his client, their negotiations should very rarely result, as it so frequently does in the litigation context, in a stalemate. While a party to a lawsuit will sometimes view proceeding to trial as the best alternative to a negotiated agreement (aka “BATNA”), the job of transactional lawyer is generally to reach agreement and get the deal done.

While Mark’s advice made a lot of sense to me in the abstract, I started thinking what does this mean? What does it mean to negotiate less like a litigator and more like a transactional lawyer?

I followed up with Mark after our lunch, and suggested this might be fertile ground for a blog post. He was pleased for the opportunity to explain his statement in more detail, and also suggested that this very topic is one that he covers extensively in a CLE program he offers to law firms and bar associations called Mediation: Prepare to Succeed.† Here’s what Mark said:

“This involves, among other things: preparing for the mediation as a negotiation, including identifying the interests of the parties, settlement ballpark and necessary deal points; focusing at the mediation on reality and problem solving instead of advocacy and pressure; using the mediator to gain and communicate information useful to making a deal rather than trying to turn the mediator into a super advocate.” 

A major difference I see in Mark’s approach from the approach we typically take is his shunning of our common tendency to try to leverage the mediator to apply pressure on our opponent that we cannot otherwise apply. This is indeed a departure.

After all, we often draft extensive mediation briefs, with cites to specific exhibits, that are little different from the brief we might submit if the neutral were sitting as an arbitrator who would issue an award, and not a mediator engaged to facilitate settlement. In an earlier era, it was common to do a mini-presentation of the arguments and evidence we expect to present at trial. In sum, we attempt to persuade the mediator of the merits of our case, with the hope she will step into the next room, caucus with our opponent, and, acting as our “super advocate,” pound them into submission.

So, if there’s no pounding, what should go on? Just as Mark points out, the mediation becomes less about applying pressure and more about “focusing . . . on reality and problem solving.”

This is all good. But I still found myself wondering more about how transactional lawyers approach negotiations. So I consulted a book about lawyering from the perspective of a career transactional lawyer. In Lawyering: A Realistic Approach to Legal Practice, M&A specialist James C. Freund says this in his introduction to the discussion of negotiating a deal:

“Most of what takes place in the course of negotiations can be characterized as either attempting to get a leg up on your adversary or striking a compromise between your respective positions. I firmly believe that the key to effective negotiating lies in achieving a functional balance between these two seemingly inconsistent aspects. If all your efforts are directed toward gaining advantages over your adversary, you will undoubtedly come on too strong; and where the parties possess relatively equal bargaining power, with freedom to consummate the transaction or not, you may cause your client irreparable harm–such as losing the deal.” (Id. at 188 (emphasis added).)

Again, from a transactional lawyer’s perspective, the goal is not to pound the other side into submission or walk away with no deal. Instead, in the interest of getting the deal done, Freund counsels that we strive to achieve a balance between getting a leg up on our opponent and striking a compromise. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

†Mark Fingerman encourages anyone interested in this presentation to reach him by email at: [email protected].

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