International Legal and Business Negotiations

“In negotiations never get angry. Convince people. Preferably with a gun.’

Don Corleone. The Godfather. Mario Puzo.

To introduce a student to one of the most important skills in business and law. This course provides thorough and professional practice in business and legal oriented negotiations. It teaches the theory of negotiation and the skills necessary to become an effective negotiator, learned in part through active exercises and simulations. The course introduces you to negotiation strategy and tactics. It teaches how to prepare, how to identify acceptable negotiated solutions and best alternatives, and how to deal with difficult negotiators. Much of the emphasis is on international and cross-cultural negotiations. This course is useful for lawyers and managers involved in negotiations on a daily basis, and recent graduates planning their careers in business. Lawyers will also be introduced to the role of the lawyer as a negotiator, and experience the lawyer/client relationship in the negotiations process.

• Provide a framework to help students understand a wide range of negotiations in cross-cultural context;
• Build the strategic and tactical skills to negotiate more effectively in cross-cultural context.
• Develop the emotional intelligence competencies to enlarge a skilful negotiator's toolbox.

Again, this is a practical skills course and its effectiveness depends on your home reading and class participation. Hence the importance of MANDATORY ATTENDANCE. 25% or more absences from class will result in failure. Time management is also crucial. Latecomers are unwelcome and may be counted partially absent.

Apart from required attendance, grades are based on quality of class participation, smart questions and precise and persuasive answers, knowledge of the theory, application of this knowledge to concrete situations in every class, ingenuity, quality of written homework and meeting homework deadlines, reports on mock negotiations and your progress in haggling tests, negotiation scenarios, and exercises.

Weekly class and homework evaluation represents the current control of the academic success.

There is no final exam.

Grades are non-negotiable.After the course you will be given a personal negotiating profile deriving from respective tests, performance in and out of class, and observations.

To forestall inquiries: some students in previous years have asked for allowances when they faced attendance problems. To reiterate, you must attend class. Moreover, students must interactively communicate in class. You cannot passively hide behind a blank zoom screen listening to a professor pontificating with rare questions and answers from the audience. The soft skills this course teaches are measured mostly through in-class active participation. The regular analytical home assignments are not a kind of dispersed, distributed-in-time exam, but are only a small part of the number of skills developed in a soft skills class. Therefore, those who do not comply with the 75% attendance rule will not be given additional home work to make up the missing classes. Russian «АВОСЬ» (maybe, perhaps) does not work here.

Also, giving the professor an early warning of your absense is not getting permission to miss class, it is only politeness and respect.