Negotiate Your Way Out of That One!

For my last equity and trusts law tutorial we were tasked with preparing and taking part in a negotiation. We were each allocated a character to play and we had to use the notes we had compiled from the lectures and the textbook on the topic of trustees powers, duties, personal liability and breach of trust to negotiate a settlement between the parties, played by other students in the group, based upon a set of facts we were provided with prior to the tutorial.

I really enjoyed the exercise because it required us to go beyond simply understanding and applying the law and shift our focus to identifying the strengths and weaknesses of our character’s case and those of the other parties and use this information to anticipate the arguments which would be raised by the other characters and tailor our approach to each issue under negotiation accordingly.

We were provided with some consolidation questions to complete after the negotiation in order to help us assess our performance and identify areas for improvement in the future. Given that we may be asked to participate in a negotiation as part of the recruitment process for some graduate jobs, I felt that it was beneficial to try it out in a tutorial because we could receive instant feedback from our tutor and not feel under too much pressure.

Let me know whether you’ve ever taken part in a negotiation and how you found the experience in the comments below.