Negotiation Law Blog

What Are Your Super Powers And What Are You Waiting For?

Victoria Pynchon — Sun, 19 May 2013 11:07:28 -0800

I just spent the weekend with a group of incredibly engaged, brilliant and successful women lawyers at the Vail Sebastian Hotel where I keynoted the annual Conference of the Colorado Womens Bar Association.

Four questions stirred the greatest interest.

What are your super powers to get things done?
Do you have (or need) the authority to use them?
What can you use them to accomplish to further your own career?
If you're not using them, why not?

Last night at the cocktail party after my presentation (slideshow below) dozens of women approached me to tell me what their "super powers" were.

Institutional Knowledge.
Ability to assign work.
Persuasiveness.
Influence over firm power brokers.
Willingness to study for and take foreign bar exams (a recurring nightmare in my book, but hey! "how is the firm recompensing you to study for and take it?")
Ability to promote younger lawyers.
Ability to form relationships with the firm's clients.
Speaking ability.
Writing ability.
Ability to: take a great deposition, write jury instructions, try a case.
A large social-professional network that can be tapped for favors and referrals.

And on and on and on.

If you have not made a list of your "super powers" please do so now. Ask yourself how they can benefit your career. Then ask yourself whether you're using them effectively to do so and if not, why not.

Then go and prosper!

'Use My Name' Is All You Need to Know About Sponsorship

Victoria Pynchon — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:12:02 -0800

“Use my name.”

Those three words are all you need to know about sponsorship and networking. You put your skin into someone else’s game. You do not use these words lightly. Your reputation rests on the quality of your referrals. And yet, we women are such rabid community builders that we can have a devoted network of business women who are also our friends even if we’ve never met in the flesh.

National Girlfriends’ Networking Day

The New Agenda has thrown down the rope of its tree house and is waiting for you to pass under the branches and grab it.

The Women Lawyers of Arnold & Porter and the Proskauer Women’s Alliance are sponsoring TNA’s Second Annual National Girlfriends Networking Day on June 4 in San Francisco and Century City.

Those women who supposedly don’t refer business to one another – Proskauer,Arnold & Porter, Ms. J.D., She Negotiates and the Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles - are all sponsoring this year’s west coast NGN Day. There will be women there you need to know to advance your career. Women whose names you’ll want to include on your referral lists and who will want to include yours in theirs. That’s how women’s business thrives.

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien will be there on a live stream from the New York Times along with More Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, Lesley Jane Seymour, Angel Investor and Advisor, Joanne Wilson, and Taj McWilliams-Franklin, WNBA Coach, Player and Community Activist. We’ll share coffee, fruit and pastries, trade business cards, and submit questions to the panel via social media.

If anyone could grant me one wish for 2013, it would be for all women everywhere to say these three words along with another woman’s name at least once a week – use my name.

C’mon on over. We have a few names for you.

Gotham Gal Goes All In For National Girlfriends' Networking Day

Victoria Pynchon — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:06:43 -0800

First off I just love the name.

National Girlfriends Networking Day is a nationwide celebration of making connections. Events take place around the country on June 4th [live streaming] three amazing women; Lesley Jane Seyour the editor of MORE magazine, Taj Williams-Franklin a WNBA coach, player and community activist and Soledad O'Brien Emmy award winning journalist. [They] will be taking questions through social media from nationwide participants.

Read on here and sign up today!

The live-streaming events are free!

Breaking News! There's Nothing Wrong With Women

Victoria Pynchon — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:04:13 -0800

Join me, Lisa Gates and Katie Donovan, along with co-host Jana Hlistova and Gloria Feldt for Take The Lead's monthly Smart Women Take The Lead webcast. Register here now. The live webcast will be Tuesday May 14th at 7pm BST, 2pm EDT. You can send questions via twitter using the hashtag #swttl – we’d love to hear from you! And if you miss the live program, you can always click the same link and see it on YouTube.

Women in the age of of AnneMarieSlaughterSherylSandbergMarissaMayer are drowning in a sea of unsolicited advice. In recent days, it’s been suggested to me (the generic woman) that I find a way to strengthen my voice (Executive Presence); jettison my womanly emotions in the workplace (don’t cry!); eliminate question marks and exclamation points from my email communications (??!!???); act more like a guy; act less like a guy (in the same article); get the best seat at the conference table; improve my handshake; ask for more money but to do so with a smile on my face andthe pretense that it’s for someone other than myself; pay more attention to my family than to social networking; devote more time to online social networking; learn to golf; seek sponsors; seek mentors; brag about my accomplishments, but modestly; conform my behavior to feminine stereotypes while covertly using man-rules; and, for heaven’s sake never, ever to curse in public. Over at Princeton, it’s even been suggested that young women do what their grandmothers did –find a man who is likely to be a “good provider” while the getting is good (before graduation). My generic woman’s head is about to explode. The solution? Start by understanding there's nothing wrong with you over at the Take the Lead blog here.

WorkLife Seamlessly Arranged By Scandal's Show Runner

Victoria Pynchon — Sun, 12 May 2013 09:55:23 -0800

This is what feminist heaven looks like.

Do we have to be this successful to rearrange the world to fit one woman's life? Or could we simply realize that this is what WorkLife looks like on the day it stops being a man's world.

Scandal's show-runner Sonda Rhimes' executive-Mommy day.

As part of her Shondaland production company, Rhimes oversees some 550 actors, writers, crew members and producers, and her days are optimized to do so. In the morning, she gets her older daughter, Harper, who is 10, off to school and then contends with whatever is most urgent: writing, giving notes on a script and watching casting videos. The televisions in her office and home are connected to a system that allows her to watch real-time editing by her editors. Both of her daughters have rooms across the hall from her office at work. The younger, a perfectly chubby-cheeked 1-year-old named Emerson, comes in every day, clambering onto Rhimes’s lap during meetings.

I'm not blaming the guys when I say that the historic accident of the modern workplace wouldn't have required men to choose between work and family. They would long ago have figured out how to have both.

Oh, wait a minute. They did. It was called "wives."

In today's economy, few men have the luxury of "wives" and even fewer working mothers have the luxury of the services wives and mothers of an earlier era provided - 24-hour child, husband and extended-family care.

According the government statistics, fifty-nine percent of all married mothers work and 67% of all single women (including those widowed and divorced) work.

Let's celebrate Mothers Day by reimagining the future of WorkLife for everyone's benefit, shall we?

20 Reasons Gen-Y Shouldn't Work for Free

Victoria Pynchon — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:02:20 -0800

1. This whole generational “work for free’ thing is not the way things have always been – its a dysfunctional feature of Great Recession where everyone was pinching pennies and a class of unemployed young people were available to be exploited.

2. We often “hired” free interns simply because you were being hawked by your universities and graduate and professional schools. We’re sorry. We weren’t thinking clearly. When we were young, we could live off of $200/month and still pay our enormous tuitions somewhere between $600 and $3,000/year. We interned. Why not you? Because we didn’t graduate burdened by tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. Our debt was manageable. Forgive us. We weren’t thinking clearly.

3. Anyone in business – including non-profits – must generate enough money to operate. They must pay their gas and electric bills for the power they receive. You should not give your power away free just because some organizations don’t believe they can afford it.

4. There’s a one percent difference in obtaining paid employment for young people who work for free and those who do not. In other words, if you’re working for free, you only have a one percent advantage over your presumed competitors in a lazy job market.

5. Many employers don’t give internships any credence at all when reviewing your resumes. They figure, “she worked for free; this ‘job’ doesn’t tell me whether she was good enough to be hired.”

6. If you get a paid job doing clerical work in your field, you can promote yourself there while you’re being paid and rise up through the ranks (it’s a low bar to move from a clerical position where some people are working at full capacity to a more professional position)

7. You are depriving yourself of future benefits when you’re not paying payroll taxes – social security, for instance, the pay-out from which is based on your lifetime earnings.

8. If you’re working for free, you’re likely displacing clerical workers who make a living doing clerical work and cannot find jobs because – among other things – recent grads are doing their work for free.

9. No matter how little people have told you you should think of yourselves, you are a store of enormous value. If you weren’t, why did you go into debt to ready yourself for the job market . . . tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. In a market economy, value is exchanged for value. It’s the way the economy works.

10. I am stealing from you if I use the value you possess to make my business more efficient and my work more effective. STEALING!!

11. It’s bad enough that I’m paying you minimum wage (I personally pay above “living” wage on which no one could live in Los Angeles). To pay you nothing devalues me as much as it devalues you.

12. The 13th Amendment.

13. I’m going to assume your left-leaning University (weren’t your Profs old hippie radicals raised during a time when America believed it could provide everyone with the basic necessities of life?) I’m going to assume your left-leaning University taught you the meaning of “wage slave.” That’s minimum wage and in some geographic regions, it’s also the presumed “living” wage. Take the word “wage” out of “wage slave” and what do you get. I thought so. See the 13th Amendment above.

14. The next great sub-prime financial debacle is believed by some to be your generation’s inability to pay back your student debt. Gee, what’s the solution to that? Pay your workers!

15. Yes, you do learn some parts of your trade working for free. But you can also learn your trade while you’re getting paid. It’s called OJT or “on the job training.” It’s not called IST – “in servitude training.”

16. Why should I be entitled to the fruits of your labor? Really. Give me ten reasons. Five. Three. I can’t think of any. If I can’t pay Gen-Y minimum wage, I shouldn’t be in business for myself. Or I should skip that third or tenth or twentieth pair of shoes.

17. I know how to make money because I’ve spent a lifetime working. You are just graduating into the real world. You do not possess the resources (or the social capital) I do to raise enough money to support another, valuable, irreplaceable, one of a kind worker. I can make enough money to pay you. You likely are far less well qualified to do so.

18. Lord Grantham, for heaven’s sake, believed it his duty to provide employment for his village even if it meant losing his estate.

19. You are not a widget in a widget factory. There are not twenty or thirty of you standing behind you looking for work. You cannot be replaced by another random 25 or 26 year old. I know how valuable you are. Find someone between 40 and 60 – or heck – all the way to 90 – grandma’s a good source – and ask them to list the numerous ways in which you bring entirely unique value to a potential employer. Then go out and convince a few fuzzy-headed elders like me that it would be shameful to take that value and use it to our benefit for free.

20. You have student debts to pay and a tax base to widen. The future of the country belongs to you, not us. Take it by the horns now, as early as you can. Don’t be anyone’s fool. Get a job. Get paid. Not only you, but we, will be glad you did.

#PayGenY is a She Negotiates initiative to end unpaid internships.

We’re posting resources there now and for the rest of the year.

Go. Do. Prosper.

10 Reasons To Negotiate Instead Of Suing The Bastards

Victoria Pynchon — Thu, 09 May 2013 07:53:47 -0800

Now more than ever.

Mediation Awareness Week. See the televised event by clicking on the image and begin at the 57-minute mark.

Ten Reasons To Negotiate Resolution

1. The Los Angeles Superior Court has closed four court houses and dozens of court rooms.

2. Time is literally money (see the time value of money).

3. The law (and your lawyer) only care about relevant facts - the most important part of your dispute may well not even be addressed, let alone resolved, by a jury verdict in your favor.

4. As your trial date nears, everyone - the judge, your lawyer, their lawyer, your spouse, your friends, and random acquaintances will urge you to negotiate a resolution with a neutral third party (a mediator).

5. Your attorney settles 90% of every case s/he litigates. S/he rarely goes to trial anymore. Ask her about the last verdict she won and then the one before that. If you have a skill (piano, golf, cooking a souffle) ask yourself how well you'd perform if you haven't used that skill recently or often.

6. Litigation is an extremely expensive board game, much of which is simply the cat and mouse exercise of discovery. Here's how it's played. I ask for documents. You object. I write you a letter demanding compliance. You write back refusing to comply and reminding me I have to "meet and confer" with you before we ask the discovery referee to intervene. We meet. We accomplish nothing. I make a motion (write a "brief") to compel you to turn over documents. You write an opposition. I write a reply. We pay the discovery referee to read our papers and listen to our oral argument. The discovery referee splits the baby in half or fourths or tenths. One of us asks the Judge not to sign off on the discovery referee's decision. More papers, more writing, more time, more of your money. The Judge, not a lion of courage, splits the baby again and refuses to award either party the costs of forcing compliance. Two months later (at least six have now elapsed) you get a stack of documents and a privilege log listing the documents that aren't being provided. I write you a letter demanding that you turn over documents on the privilege log. Rinse. Repeat.

7. As if the disrespect of the original dispute were not enough, I now get to sit you down in a conference room with a court reporter and spend a day or two asking you questions you don't want to answer. Often, the questions are asked in a disrespectful manner. When you complain to your attorney, he says "that's just the way the game is played." Focus on the word game. Are you having fun yet?

8. You get a bill for legal services rendered every month but you're no closer to resolution after receiving and paying 12 of these than you were on day one.

9. You're a business person. You negotiate business deals every day. Your lawyer does not.

10. You have given away any power you might once have possessed to resolve this dispute to a lawyer who does not understand your business, your life or the facts that drove you to seek legal advice in the first place.

Had enough? There are people out there - mediators - who are specially trained in helping you first communicate with your attorney and then helping you negotiate the resolution of your dispute with the "other side." Choose carefully. There are as many bad mediators there as there are litigators. My best advice? Negotiate the resolution of the dispute yourself even if it requires you to swallow your pride and to be the first one to say, "let's sit down and figure out how best to serve your interests and mine at the same time."

When Women Answer the Call to Leadership

Victoria Pynchon — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:00:02 -0800

For those of us laboring in the "women in leadership" fields, it's very heartening to read the Op-Ed page of the New York Times this morning.

Maureen Dowd tells us the jig is up on military rape, assault and harassment because the "women of Congress are on the case."

Three of the six Senate Armed Services subcommittees are now led by women.

Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a former prosecutor who is one of seven women (five of them lawyers) on the Armed Services Committee, has held up the nomination of Lt. Gen. Susan Helms to be vice commander of the Air Force’s Space Command until she investigates why Helms overturned a conviction in a sexual assault case.

“You don’t get to decide who’s telling the truth and supplant the judgment of the jury you handpicked if you weren’t in the courtroom observing the witnesses,” Senator McCaskill said. “You’ve got to put systems in place where you catch these cowards committing crimes and you put them in prison.”

The military brass cossetting predators are on notice. The women of Congress are on the case.

Three of the six Senate Armed Services subcommittees are now led by women. Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a former prosecutor who is one of seven women (five of them lawyers) on the Armed Services Committee, has held up the nomination of Lt. Gen. Susan Helms to be vice commander of the Air Force’s Space Command until she investigates why Helms overturned a conviction in a sexual assault case.

The military brass cossetting predators are on notice. The women of Congress are on the case.

In Postcard From Yemen on that same page. Thomas L. Freidman tells us that there's a ray of hope in the water wars because women are on the case.

There is a ray of hope, though. Yemenis are engaged in a unique and peaceful national dialogue — very different from Syria and Egypt and with about a third of the input coming from women — to produce a new leadership. They may be starting at the bottom. But, of all the Arab awakening states, they do have the best chance to start over — now — if they seize it.

These are the reasons we step up to power, particularly if we have the education, wisdom, knowledge, training and background to make a difference for our fellows - male and female.

Because with great privilege comes great responsibility. Because, as Mary Oliver wrote, When it's over, I don't want to wonder/if I have made of my life something particular, and real./I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened/or full of argument/I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Are Women's Initiatives Meant To Fail?

Victoria Pynchon — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:48:51 -0800

Nearly every law student in the country from the oldest grad to the youngest aspirant, learns the meaning of "intent" in civil law from the case of Garratt v. Dailey.

You may not want to hurt Bill, but if you put an apple on his head, raise your shotgun and pull the trigger, the law will say you intended to kill him in the highly likely event that your William Tell act causes Bill's death.

The rule that Garratt applies to a five-year old's decision to pull out the chair out an adult woman is about to sit in is this - if the defendant knows with a substantial certainty that his act will result in harm, he must be presumed to have intended it.

Which takes us directly to law firm women's initatives. As the National Association of Women Lawyers' 2012 survey of BigLaw women's initiatives concluded, the programing offered by BigLaw to retain and promote women does not achieve its goals. Not only that, but these women's initiatives rarely have measurable promotional goals.

As the Survey reports, even though women’s initiatives have been in effect for at least a decade, "what such initiatives actually do, and the impact they have on women in firms, is all too often not clear and at worst, open to criticism bordering on cynicism." More particularly,

fewer than half of all women’s initiatives are evaluated annually by management. Similarly, fewer than half of all women’ initiatives submit written evaluations. Moreover, it is not clear that the reporting and evaluation functions focus on specific goals. Some 40% of firms report no specific criteria at all for their evaluation. Of those who report goal-related evaluation criteria, there is often no connection to concrete advancement criteria. Thus, descriptions of evaluation criteria were often along the lines of “accomplishment of goals and activities identified at the start of each year” or “number of events, quality of events, participation level.”

Based on the considerable data included in the FAWL report, it appears that law firm managers know that their women's initiatives are substantially certain to fail.

Under the rule of Garratt v. Daily, knowledge establishes intent. If we take the legal view, we must conclude that BigLaw intends its women's initiatives to fail.

Why would they do that?

Not being on the witness stand, I'm free to speculate.

Women's initiatives are meant to fail because:

they create the appearance that BigLaw is doing everything it can to retain and promote its women;
the appearance of equitable treatment is important to the recruitment of new associates;
the appearance of equitable treatment is important to Fortune 500 clients, most of whom have diversity goals to fulfill; and,
the appearance of equitable treatment gets the law firm off the hook of actually finding a way to transfer power from a system of cronyism to a system that applies objective metrics to performance which would reward lawyers for their work as much or more than for their internal politicial influence.

People in power, making lots and lots of money, do not willingly change the systems that reward them.

Is there a solution? You bet. Check back here within the week and we'll let you know what the Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles will help you do about it.

What Are Women Missing? National Girlfriends Networking Day!

Victoria Pynchon — Wed, 01 May 2013 13:04:43 -0800

This is your invitation to join The New Agenda, Ms. JD, She Negotiates, and the Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles at Proskauer Rose in Century City on June 4, 2013, at 9 a.m. for National Girlfriends' Networking Day. We'll be networking, of course, as well as live streaming a stellar panel of successful women including Emmy Award winning journalist Soledad O'Brien, Editor-in-Chief of More Magazine Leslie Jane Seymour, angel investor and advisor of Women Entrepreneurs, Joanne Wilson, and WNBA player and coach, Taj McWilliams Franklin.

This is also your invitation to attend the LIVE event in New York City and a half-dozen other live streaming events in San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Rochester and Short Hills.

Why should you attend the Second Annual National Girlfriends' Networking Day?

Because

The women in your firm may mentor you (teach you the ropes) but not sponsor you (put their skin in your game).
Or the women in your firm may do nothing for you.
Or, worse, the women in your firm may sabotage you. (Men will too so don’t think this is about "cat fights" or "Queen Bees" or any other women hating tropes).

This is about the accumulation of wealth and power and no gender owns avarice or generosity. Speaking of which, a huge round of applause to Proskauer in Century City and Arnold & Porter in San Francisco for lending their offices and catering support to the live streaming events in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

L.A. Mayor - "I Love My Women Lawyers"

When I was at the annual gala for the 100+ year old Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles (WLALA) recently, the Mayor said from the podium that he loved his women lawyers because “they never asked for a raise!”

The nearly 300 attendees dropped their jaws pretty much at once. We underestimate in-group and implicit bias to our peril because there are special pitfalls for women that the guys don't have to deal with. See Karen v. Kevin over at the Atlantic Wire here.

All of that said, to whom do you turn?

You turn to your sisters in your national network – women willing to put their skin in your game because they understand the concept of the “anchor” in negotiations.

If women’s work is being paid substantially less well than men’s, that serves as an incredibly strong “anchor” that will influence any compensation negotiation in its direction throughout the course of the bargaining session.

So what’s the answer? Turn to your national network. Read about it and participate in it here - The New Agenda » National Girlfriends’ Networking Day. Regardless of the “facts on the ground” in your profession or business today, I urge you to support and participate in National Girlfriends’ Networking Day.

And if you’re an old dog like me, donate to it. We’re counting on our awesome young women to destroy the wage gap forever. Still, the revolution must be funded!