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Body Language During Negotiation: Use These Tips at Your Own Risk

By Eric Lipman

Over at The Careerist, Vivia Chen has set out a few tactics that lawyers might want to use the next time they sit down at a conference room table and try to hammer out a deal, be it settlement of some silly domain name dispute or where to put the commas in your $1.6 billion merger agreement. Why do I say might want to use? Well, the tactics Chen discusses are all about body language, and are taken from an article in Forbes magazine that is written by communications consultant Nick Morgan. Morgan's "three basic steps to winning an argument" are: Mirror your adversary. He means what he says. If the other guy leans forward on one elbow, you lean forward on one elbow; if he stands with his hands on the back of a chair, you do it. If argument gets heated, stop mirroring and "align." If the dude with his elbow on the table starts screaming at you, slowly make your way to his side of the table and sit down next to him. If that doesn't work, pull out the "reverse raise the roof" dance. Yup. On this one, I'll have to go with a direct quote:...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on August 05, 2010 (boomark / email).