What Lessons Can Draft Day Teach Us About Successful Negotiations?

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What Lessons Can Draft Day Teach Us About Successful Negotiations?

Does 2014’s Draft Day - starring Kevin Costner and Jennifer Garner - have the single greatest negotiation scene of all time? I’ll leave that judgement to history, but I will say that watching Costner’s Sonny Weaver Jr. parlay one first round draft pick into three key new players in the film’s finale is as electrifying as it is improbable, and it contains three useful lessons on negotiation for lawyers and lay people alike.

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How To Write Emails Like A Lawyer

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Email gets a bad rap these days for a lot of reasons. It’s permanent (i.e. not self-destructing like Snapchat), it’s not a good mobile communication solution, it takes too much time, there’s too much of it, it’s rife with spam, and so on and so forth. But I actually love email for a lot of those reasons (not the spam stuff, obviously). To me, these aren’t bugs, they’re features; they’re exactly what makes email a useful business

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Robin Wright Threatens to Topple House of Cards By Playing Hardball In Negotiations

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Robin Wright Threatens to Topple House of Cards By Playing Hardball In Negotiations

Normally I don’t recommend threatening the other party. If you don’t have the leverage to follow through on the threat it could backfire. But in this case, Wright (who is also a producer and director on the show) had two things going for her that made the tactic pay off. First, she knew she had the upper hand. She was too popular to simply replace with another actor and the bad blood resulting in her leaving the show and publicly bashing her former employer could’ve seriously impacted the show’s cache with its viewer base, maybe even killing it.

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Reality vs. Perfection: Why I'm Okay With Sesame Street's Move To HBO Even Though I'm Not Happy About It

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Reality will place limits on you... and that's okay. Perfection is an illusion anyway. Real world pragmatism - that is, taking the world as it is, not how you'd like it to be - isn't something to rebel against, it's to be embraced. I think a lot of people - lawyers included - think that if you can't get everything you want, you've failed, and that means you're weak. You haven't represented your client to the best of your ability; you haven't bent the world to your will. But that's a lie because that's not how the world works. What were my instructors really saying? Get used to imperfection. We lawyers can stand to internalize that a bit more and pass that knowledge on to our clients.

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You Should Consider Licensing Your Work To Your Infringers

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When you find out that someone is using your work without your permission, the urge to satisfy your vengeance upon the infringer will feel overwhelming. Sending a threatening letter can be a powerful salve because it indulges your righteous fury. But you should fight that urge because I think being nice can often reap you greater benefits.

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