Arbitration & Mediation

Negotiating Emotion (and Client Development) with Arnie Herz at Legal Sanity

By Victoria Pynchon

(image by the great Charles Fincher at LawComix)

Thanks first to LexBlog for giving yesterday's post here a shout-out but more importantly, thanks to LexBlog for giving Arnie Herz' post at Legal Sanity Why lawyers should get emotional with clients coverage in the same daily compilation of LexBlog client posts, a tremendous resource I highly recommend you include on your news reader.

You'll see from my lengthy comment there that Arnie is singing my song about the law and emotion and in particular, the fact that we cannot make decisions without emotion something every trial lawyer, negotiator, mediator and sales person knows down to the knuckles of their spine.  Excerpt from Legal Sanity below.

Here are two facts:

• There's a client service deficit in the law.

• Lawyers tend to regard emotions – their own and other people's – as irrelevant to their work.

At first glance, these two facts seem unrelated. But they're actually closely (even intimately) connected. 

Some time back, I posted on the interplay of emotions and client service in this new era of customer control. I linked to a ClickZ article citing a (then) new book by Dan Hill called Emotionomics: Winning Hearts and Minds. Launching from the premise that humans are primarily emotional decision-makers, the book discusses how emotions factor into our business opportunities in the marketplace and workplace. 

Picking up on this point from a slightly different angle, in a recent post, designer and marketing mentor Peleg Top says, Go ahead, get emotional. Top notes that, in marketing (and, I'd add, in providing) our services, 'an effective way to generate action is to tell a compelling story, one that hits your customer's emotions.' Suggesting that most service providers miss this mark, he observes . . .

For the remainder of Arnie's great post, click here.  And here's another great link on the same topic from Cutting Edge Law - the illicit relationship of lawyers and emotion.

More on the effective use of emotion in the negotiation of settlements soon.

Full post as published by Settle It Now Negotiation Blog on April 03, 2009 (boomark / email).