agreements

A contract is an agreement having a lawful object entered into voluntarily by two or more parties, each of whom intends to create one or more legal obligations between them. The elements of a contract are “offer” and “acceptance” by “competent persons” having legal capacity who exchange “consideration” to create “mutuality of obligation.”

The following items are tagged agreements.

The Pitfalls of Faulty Contracts

Posted by & filed under Sales Negotiations.

Some of the trickier aspects of designing the right contract with your agent include properly aligning her incentives and monitoring her work. Supervising your agent can be especially hard when she knows more than you do about the area of work. For example, hiring an agent who’s a lawyer and paying her on an hourly basis may induce her to spend more time than you think you necessary – at your expense. She might become a literary perfectionist, spending hours crafting and polishing an offer letter to the other side when, as far as you’re concerned, the second draft would have done just fine. To prevent her from running up needless hours, you might opt instead for a fixed-fee engagement. Then, however, she may cut corners, doing just enough to reach her fee.

Conflict Off the Rink: The NHL Negotiations

Posted by & filed under Conflict Management.

Negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the National Hockey League Player’s Association (NHLPA) and the NHL’s team owners took a tumultuous turn in mid-August, a month before the current agreement’s looming expiration date of September 15.

The Role of Urban Planners in Negotiations: Case Study of Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations

Posted by & filed under Events, International Negotiation, Middle East Negotiation Initiative.

Karen Lee Bar-Sinai is the director and co-founder of SAYA/Design for Change (www.sayarch.com). SAYA is based in Israel and specializes in what can be called “peace architecture” — using planning and design to support decision-making, negotiations and peace processes in areas of conflict. Bar-Sinai’s talk will explore how urban design thinking and planning can aid the negotiation process in general.

The Practical Art of Improvising an Agreement

Posted by & filed under 1 Day Courses, Executive Training.

It’s a fact: negotiation can’t be scripted. That’s true whether you’re negotiating a mega-deal or buying a used car. Whatever the context, you can’t dictate what your counterpart is going to do or say any more than you’d let them dominate you. Successful negotiation thus requires strategic agility and being nimble moment to moment, so you can adjust and adapt as the process unfolds. Challenging the static model of standard win-win and hardball approaches, Harvard Business School professor Michael Wheeler demonstrates the practical art of improvising an agreement.

Negotiating with Your Agent

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

Toby knew that Dara was the perfect New York literary agent for him as soon as he heard her friendly, professional voice on the phone. Never mind that 17 other agents had already rejected his book proposal. Dara’s enthusiasm and recent sales convinced him to sign the three-year exclusive contract she mailed to him in Atlanta.

Roger Fisher Papers Open at Harvard Law School Library

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

Roger Fisher, one of the cofounders of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and Samuel Williston Professor of Law, Emeritus, was honored on the 8th of April with a celebration of his career, research, and contributions to both the HLS community and the field of negotiation.

A Worse Deal than You Think?

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

Most negotiators leave the bargaining table believing they were better at pushing the other side to its limit than was actually the case, according to recent experimental studies by Richard P. Larrick of Duke University and George Wu of the University of Chicago.

The Enduring Power of Anchors

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

In past issues of Negotiation, we’ve reviewed the anchoring effect – the tendency for negotiators to be overly influenced by the other side’s opening bid, however arbitrary. When your opponent makes an inappropriate bid on your house, you’re nonetheless likely to begin searching for data that confirms the anchor’s viability. This testing is likely to affect your judgment – to the other party’s advantage.

Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman identified the anchoring effect in 1974. Participants watched a roulette wheel that, unknown to them, was rigged to stop at either 10 or 65, the estimated the number of African countries belonging to the United Nations. For half of the participants, the roulette wheel stopped on 10. They gave a median estimate of 25 countries. For the other half, the wheel stopped on 65. Their median estimate was 45 countries. The random anchors dramatically affected judgment.

When Umbrella Agreements Spring Leaks in Dispute Resolution

Posted by & filed under Dispute Resolution.

Negotiators tend to want the best of both worlds. When reaching an agreement, they want to nail down parties’ respective rights and responsibilities, but they also want to retain the flexibility to deal with ever-changing business conditions.

One solution to this apparent dilemma is to craft umbrella, or framework, agreements. (The term umbrella is more commonly used in the business world, while framework is more widely used in legal and diplomatic circles.) Such agreements set out general principals that will apply to more specific give-and-take contracts in the future. An umbrella agreement between a soft-drink company and a grocery chain, for example, would typically cover issues such as exclusivity, invoicing, confidentiality, and termination. Subsequent short-term contracts would set prices and promotional allowances for specific products.

Apple and Samsung: A Dispute Between Business Negotiators

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

For two days in late May, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Samsung CEO Gee-Sung Choi met with a judge in the U.S. District Court of Northern California in an attempt to reach a settlement in a high-profile U.S. patent case, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Back in April 2011, Apple filed a lawsuit accusing Samsung of copying the “look and feel” of the iPhone when the Korean company created its Galaxy line of phones. Samsung countersued Apple for not paying royalties for using its wireless transmission technology. Since then, the number of patents under dispute has skyrocketed, according to the Korea Times, as has the number of courts involved in various countries. The two companies have repeatedly accused each other of copying the appearance and functions of their smartphones and tablet devices.