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Pepperdine | Caruso School of Law

Strategic Negotiation Skills

Faculty:  Tom Stipanowich and Denise Madigan

Lawyers, managers, and other professionals can learn the latest negotiation theories and techniques in this interactive, practical, and entertaining course. Negotiation and Settlement Skills evolved from extensive work with more than 40,000 lawyers and managers in forty states. Building on the empirical data from the fields of business, communication, and psychology, the course utilizes sophisticated simulations and case studies to create a conceptual roadmap for negotiation strategy.

What you will learn:

  • Four stages of negotiation
  • Characteristics of distributive and integrative bargaining
  • Three styles of negotiations
  • Recognition and management of mixed-motive exchange
  • Techniques of competitive and collaborative negotiation
  • Interplay between style and strategy
  • The strength of alternatives in negotiation
  • Negotiation tactics and how to counter them
  • Sources and uses of power
  • Avoiding conflict aftermath
  • The dynamics of multi-party, multi-issue bargaining
  • Evaluation of negotiation success

Thomas Stipanowich is the William H. Webster Chair in Dispute Resolution and professor of law at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. He is also the academic director of the Straus Institute. Stipanowich brings a long and distinguished career as a scholar, teacher, and leader in the field along with wide-ranging experience as a commercial and construction mediator, arbitrator, federal court special master, and facilitator. From 2001 until mid-2006, he served as CEO of the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution (CPR Institute). He has authored two of the leading books on commercial arbitration and many articles on ADR. Recently he coauthored a groundbreaking book and materials entitled Resolving Disputes: Theory, Practice, and Law.

Denise R. Madigan has been mediating full-time for over 20 years. She entered the field as associate director for the Harvard-MIT Public Disputes Program in the early 1980s, mediating large-scale public policy disputes. After practicing law at Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C., she joined the pioneering ADR firm, Endispute, Inc., (which later merged with JAMS). Her mediation practice is extraordinarily broad, and includes complex commercial, entertainment, intellectual property, insurance, mass accidents, public policy and health care, among others. In addition to her full-time mediation practice, MadiganADR, she has taught negotiation and mediation at the Straus Institute since the mid-1990s. Madigan also has designed and/or taught hundreds of tailored negotiation and ADR courses for courts, law firms, government agencies, universities, nonprofits, and corporations in the United States, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.