After putting Argus down last October due to spleen cancer, we got a new dog- Cookie - who just turned three. Needless to say, after having a senior citizen dog, it is quite a change to be taking care of a young dog again.Unlike our other dogs, Cookie loves to [Read More]
When it comes to relying on our memories in negotiation, the cautionary tale is buyer beware! Once again, another study has been published demonstrating that our memories are quite fallible. They are simply not nearly as reliable as we think they are, and consequently, we should not rely on them [Read More]
Perception and transparency. Both are very importantin mediations and negotiations but can be so easily overlooked. This was brought home to me recently in a lengthy mediation that I conducted. It involved a commercial lease and the issue was whether money was owed by the tenant to the landlord for [Read More]
In December 2010, my water bill was extremely high; I posted a blog about my dispute with the Coachella Valley Water District ("CVWD"). In the end, I paid the bill as I did not want to receive a black mark on my credit history. (The CVWD has no mechanism like [Read More]
Recently, I conducted a mediation in a matter which probably should never have been filed as a lawsuit; the economics simply were not there. Realistically, plaintiff could not have a Better Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA); every scenario would have been more costly no matter what the amount of [Read More]
In her latest edition of One Minute Negotiating Tips appearing in the August 2013 edition of the Los Angeles County Bar Association's digital magazine ( Volume VII, No. 2), my colleague Linda Bulmash addresses a topic near and dear to me: preparing for negotiation. Her tip actually takes more than [Read More]
In 1999, Professors Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted a now well known study at Harvard University on distraction. As explained in a recent article on BBC Health News:Participants watched a video of two groups of people passing a basketball around - one group in black shirts, one group in [Read More]
If you have ever been in a dispute or in a conflict with someone (and who hasn't!), at some point, the "facts" of what allegedly happened are dissected. More often than not, there is disagreement about exactly what happened. It becomes a "he said, she said" argument in which credibility [Read More]
