Find Mediators Near You:

Negotiating Emotion (And Client Development) With Arnie Herz At Legal Sanity

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 Lawthe illicit relationship of lawyers and emotion.

                        author

Victoria Pynchon

Attorney-mediator Victoria Pynchon is a panelist with ADR Services, Inc. Ms. Pynchon was awarded her LL.M Degree in Dispute Resolution from the Straus Institute in May of 2006, after 25 years of complex commercial litigation practice, with sub-specialties in intellectual property, securities fraud, antitrust, insurance coverage, consumer class actions and all… MORE >

Featured Mediators

ad
View all

Read these next

Category

Personal Transformations are Required for Corporate Transformation

I’m publishing this newsletter series to discuss the nuances of the four timeless topics for people and organizations: conflict, change, transformation, and consciousness. Please subscribe to never miss an article....

By Ralph Kilmann
Category

Jay Folberg: Let Clients Decide – Video

Jay Folberg talks about a client-centered approach where the parties (and lawyers) should choose the kind of process and style they want in a mediation.

By Jay Folberg
Category

Mediator as Judge

When trained as a mediator, the first thing I learned was that mediation is a client-driven process. The ideal is for the mediation clients themselves to figure out the terms...

By Laurie Israel
×