Choosing the right words for your contract is a negotiation in itself. Five guidelines will help you achieve greater precision.

When negotiators sign on the dotted line, they sometimes worry about the wrong concerns.

“Did I overpay?” wonders the buyer as he inks the sales agreement.

Across the table, the seller is thinking, “I bet if I’d pushed … Read Dealmaking: What About the Fine Print?  

In negotiation, deception can run rampant: parties “stretch” the numbers, conceal key information, and make promises they know they can’t keep.

Unfortunately, most of us are very poor lie detectors. Even professions that encounter liars regularly, such as police officers and judges, do not perform better than chance at detecting deception, Professor Paul Ekman of the … Learn More About This Program 

Sometimes the courts will be unwilling to get involved in the substantive terms of the deal but will impose procedural constraints on the more powerful party.

Consider the case of a controlling shareholder in a publicly traded company – someone who holds more than 51% – who wants to “cash out” the minority shareholders.

Under the corporate … Learn More About This Program 

Most negotiators understand the importance of preparation and will dedicate significant time and energy to analyzing important negotiations in advance.

Chances are, however, that powerful negotiators will undertake less informative and less accurate analyses than their weaker counterparts will.

For instance, in a hypothetical salary raise negotiation, a negotiator may be so confident of her contributions that … Read You Have Less Information Than You Think 

Recently, a corporation that we’ll call Firm A was negotiating to give another company, Firm B, access to its intellectual property. The CEOs reached an oral agreement on deal terms, and the lawyers on both sides began drafting the formal contract.

At this point, Firm B asked for the right to use Firm A’s intellectual property … Read What aren’t you noticing in your negotiations? 

In July 2013, U.S. Associate Attorney General Tony West met with JPMorgan Chase executives to outline an array of civil and criminal investigations of the bank, related primarily to its sales of troubled mortgage investments during the financial crisis. … Learn More About This Program 

On October 31, 2013, Time Warner Cable reported a huge quarterly loss of television subscribers, the largest in its history: 306,000 of its 11.7 million subscribers had dropped the company, the New York Times reports. The bad news has been attributed largely to an impasse with television network CBS over fees, which led to Time … Learn More About This Program 

In 2009, when Chrysler on the verge of financial collapse, the Treasury Department negotiated a swift solution to save it from extinction. Chrysler would go into bankruptcy, and then its ownership would be divided up, with the majority going to a Chrysler union workers’ health-care trust, 20% to Italian automaker Fiat, 10% to the U.S. … Learn More About This Program 

When months of negotiations with publishing house Simon & Schuster reached a standoff in January 2013, Barnes & Noble attempted to gain leverage by significantly reducing its orders of Simon & Schuster titles and engaging in other hardball tactics, such as refusing to book the publisher’s authors for in-store readings. … Learn More About This Program