I mentioned in a couple of recent posts that I was entering a negotiation competition. Well, my part in it’s come and gone, and I wanted to write a little about the experience and the feelings it stirred up.
UConn Law has a student group called the Negotiation and Dispute Resolution Society. It’s one of the big three competition groups on campus. The other two, Mock Trial and Moot Court, are focused on simulating a courtroom environment and testing students’ skills there, but NDRS is a little different. Students represent one side that’s trying to reach an agreement with the other outside of a courtroom, which is a different environment and more collaborative. (To give you an example, the first round of the contest, my team and I were representing a fictional fashion company trying to sign an also-fictional A-list celebrity to be the face of a major advertising campaign.) The goal is to get the best possible deal for your client, but the incentive is to make a deal that both sides are reasonably happy with.
They have a yearly competition for 1L students at UConn, putting us in teams of two and having us compete against each other in several rounds over two weeks. Every team gets to participate in two preliminary rounds, and then the top 16 teams are invited to additional rounds, narrowing the field to 8, 4, 2, and then a final competition to crown the winning team.
I decided to enter. As I’ve mentioned previously, negotiation is a critical skill for lawyers who represent labor unions in particular, as collective bargaining contracts need to be negotiated, and it’s one I wanted to practice. Employers like to see participation in competition groups and/or law journals, and I can’t join a journal until 2L year (cue stressed-out posts in May about the write-on competition), but I can do this now. It also felt like less pressure than the other competitions - mock trial and moot court involve longer preparation periods and can involve competing against other schools, but this competition takes place over a shorter window, only pits us against other UConn 1Ls, and we get our fact patterns a maximum of two days before the actual negotiation. Preparation is important, but I didn’t expect it to consume as much time as other competitions.
I was teamed up with Sofia, a woman in my section, and our first two rounds were the week of the 11th. We were both really nervous before the first round, but it went great! The other team was very skilled, but came in with a collaborative approach, and together we were able to reach a deal that both sides were pleased with. The first two rounds are judged by students in the NDRS, and the student judges appreciated our professionalism, how prepared we were, and how we were able to work together effectively.
The second preliminary round also went well. We were up against a very good team who pressed harder on a couple of points than we’d seen in the first round, but in the end we reached a good deal. The student judges made a point of praising a particular tactic Sofia and I had used (offering two separate package deals rather than continuing to negotiate individual points separately) and again praised us for coming in well-prepared, with a few notes on how we could tighten up our game.
We were thrilled to be invited to the “octo-finals” on Monday the 18th, the first invite-only round in the competition. 42 teams had entered, but only 16 made it to this round. However, from here on out, the pressure would increase in several ways: the fact patterns we had to use to negotiate would get more complex, we would have less time with the fact pattern before the start of the competition, and the judges would be UConn faculty and practicing lawyers. For our octo-round, our judges were a professor who was dean emeritus of the entire law school and the associate dean in charge of law clinics and field placements. No pressure, right?
We faced an excellent team in the octo-finals, and to be blunt, they got the better of us. They had a particular point they pushed hard on and brought up at every opportunity, and while at one point I felt their tactics crossed a line by going back on something my team and the judges understood we’d previously agreed to, for the most part they were just tougher and more assertive than us. The judges criticized our approach for being too soft and conciliatory - we needed to be firmer with our words, move less in response to the other side, call them out on these tactics, demand concessions even when the other side was asking for something our client was happy to agree to.
We didn’t find out who would progress right away, so I went to the library and tried to do the Torts reading I’d set aside earlier that day so I could prepare for the competition. Instead, I fully freaked out and began questioning whether I was actually cut out to be a lawyer.
Something a couple of people had brought up during orientation and the first class or two is that many children are told “you should be a lawyer when you grow up,” and often it’s not a compliment. It gets told to assertive, argumentative kids. A lot of people imagine lawyers as what we see in courtroom dramas, and while I love some of those movies, it’s not a realistic depiction of what life is like for most lawyers. Many rarely or never go to court at all. Even those who do appear in court regularly spend an enormous amount of time preparing for court - gathering evidence, researching past cases, crafting the legal strategy and arguments they’ll use at trial. It’s not as glamourous as a trial, so in the movies, it gets the montage treatment to save more time for a big, dramatic finale in front of the judge and jury, but it’s the heart of legal work.
I was never one of those kids who got told they’d be a good lawyer. It wasn’t on my radar as a potential career until junior year of college, when I took a couple of constitutional law courses as a political science major and realized I really enjoyed that method of study and thinking about issues. By nature, I’m not argumentative. I have strongly held opinions and passions, yes, but I'm actually pretty conflict-avoidant. Even during 10 years in politics, I didn’t like to debate or argue about my political views. I don’t want to hurt anyone else’s feelings or stir up my own emotions like that.
Until that competition, I didn’t really think of this as an impediment to being a lawyer. I’m good at researching, writing, and strategizing - skills just as crucial for a lawyer as arguing. But struggling in the competition rattled my confidence and led to a lot of self-doubt. I began to question whether I was actually tough enough to be a lawyer. I imagined representing a union and letting them down because the corporate lawyers on the other side were better, tougher negotiators than me, and imagined how horrible that would feel. I started to wonder if I were really cut out for this job.
Fortunately, I have excellent family and friends I can text when I’m struggling, and they helped pull me out of that particular doom spiral. They pointed out, reasonably, that I’m new to law school and that this is a skill I’ll learn along the way like any other, and that in my past polling career I’ve had to be determined and push through obstacles, and I did so successfully.
Naturally, a couple hours later I got the email that we had not moved on to the competition quarterfinals. By that point, I was a little more levelheaded about the whole thing and also a little relieved that I’d get some precious studying hours back by not progressing in the competition. (It was 10:30 at night when I got that email and I was in a drive-thru getting dinner.) Later on that week, it also helped to see that the teams we’d competed against ended up progressing very well through the competition - on Friday, two teams we’d previously gone up against went against each other in the final, and the team we faced in the second preliminary round won it all. (Congrats to Jackson Reis and James Ingersoll!) Surely we had to be pretty good if we’d faced such talented opponents and still made it as far as we did, right?
One of the things I tend toward, which I think many people share, is feeling hopeless and wanting to give up if I’m not great at something right away. It can be really tough to take in that criticism and use it to do better - I think it’s natural to want to retreat instead. But messing up is how we learn and do better. I have a class devoted entirely to negotiation during the January term, and I think I’ll do better in that class after having this experience. Hopefully I’ll be able to build on that and continue to grow as a negotiator, even if it’s not my strongest suit, so I can represent my clients well as a future lawyer.
In the meantime, I’m getting involved in other things on campus while continuing to focus on my studies. I’m volunteering with the Public Interest Law Group to help them get donations from local businesses for their February auction, which raises money to fund fellowships for students who want to take summer internships at places that are doing good work but can’t afford to pay interns as much as they’d make at private law firms (like nonprofits, legal aid clinics, and government). I’m also on the Outreach Committee for the Mental Health Committee and I’m going to work with the UConn Law chapter of the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) and a local refugee resettlement group to help refugees complete employment authorization forms and get legally qualified to work in the U.S. I’m really excited to be involved with all of it!