ADR and Negotiation: Building Relationships as We Negotiate
This paper reviews Roger Fisher and Scott Brown's Getting Together: Building Relationships as We Negotiate, examining how the book's core principles apply to legal practice and alternative dispute resolution. The paper walks through six interconnected themes — rationality, understanding, communication, reliability, persuasion, and acceptance — and connects each to relevant legal concepts such as intentional infliction of emotional distress, voluntary manslaughter, contract voidability, and attorney professional conduct rules. The analysis demonstrates how negotiation theory and legal doctrine reinforce one another, offering practical guidance for transactional attorneys and litigators who must maintain productive relationships despite adversarial positions.
- Introduction: Relationships in Legal Negotiation: Overview of Fisher and Brown's negotiation framework for lawyers
- Rationality: Balancing Emotion and Reason: Managing emotions in negotiations using legal doctrine parallels
- Understanding: Overcoming Barriers to Knowledge: How inquiry and perspective-taking reduce negotiation misunderstandings
- Communication: Clarity, Directness, and Active Listening: Three barriers to communication and how to overcome them
- Reliability and Honesty in Legal Practice: Trustworthiness and attorney confidentiality in negotiations
- Persuasion Over Coercion: Leverage and persuasion tactics versus coercive bargaining
- Acceptance as the Foundation of Negotiation: Acceptance as the unifying principle of relationship-based negotiation
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What makes this paper effective
- Each section grounds an abstract negotiation principle in a concrete legal doctrine — for example, connecting Fisher and Brown's "rationality" concept to the heat-of-passion standard in criminal law, which demonstrates interdisciplinary analytical thinking.
- The paper maintains a consistent applied perspective throughout, asking not just what the book argues but what an attorney practicing in ADR should do differently as a result.
- Legal citations (California Penal Code, California Civil Code, Rules of Professional Conduct) are woven naturally into the analysis rather than listed as afterthoughts, giving the paper credibility and specificity.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper uses analogical reasoning to bridge two domains — negotiation theory and legal doctrine. Rather than summarizing Fisher and Brown and then separately discussing law, the author integrates them point by point, showing how each negotiation principle either mirrors or is enforced by an existing legal rule. This is a hallmark technique in law school writing: using doctrine to test or validate a theoretical claim.
Structure breakdown
The paper follows the chapter structure of the book under review, with six numbered sections corresponding to each of Fisher and Brown's core principles. An introductory paragraph frames the purpose and identifies the source text. Each body section opens with the book's principle, then draws a legal parallel, and closes with a practical implication for legal practice. The final section on acceptance serves as a functional conclusion, arguing that acceptance subsumes the other five principles.
Introduction: Relationships in Legal Negotiation
As individuals, transactional attorneys, or litigators, lawyers must develop and in some instances maintain relationships despite substantive differences and opposing positions. Getting Together: Building Relationships as We Negotiate focuses on common misconceptions in relationship building and on how to develop productive relations during the often adversarial negotiation process. Roger Fisher & Scott Brown, Getting Together: Building Relationships as We Negotiate (2d ed. 1988). The authors emphasize that too often individuals expect relationships to be founded on reciprocity and on having one's interests accommodated — even at the expense of the relationship itself. Fisher and Brown explain, however, that the relationship should be treated separately from the substantive disagreement. They argue that the key to negotiating a comfortable compromise requires the parties to focus on five core qualities: rationality, understanding, communication, reliability, and acceptance.
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