- Hello, I'm Susan Borke, principal of BorkeWorks. My mission is to help you tap into the power of strong negotiation skills. I provide a research-based, problem-solving, interactive approach to negotiation training that reduces negotiation anxiety and improves negotiator effectiveness. If you don't ask, you won't get. I first used this simple principle as a financially-strapped college student who needed to find a way to get course credit for an unpaid internship without paying tuition. It was one of my first successful negotiations and helped to spark my passion for teaching this strategy and other effective negotiating techniques. I am passionate about helping people develop as effective negotiators. I believe no one is born a master negotiator. Great negotiation skills come from a combination of knowledge, training, and practice. I have over 35 years of negotiating and negotiation training experience with domestic and international commercial companies, educational institutions, and nonprofits as a media executive at CBS, in-house council at National Geographic, and running my own negotiation training business. My goal is to start you on the path to becoming a more effective and successful negotiator in your everyday negotiations with other attorneys, team members, vendors, and on behalf of clients. Let's get started. I wanna talk about the learning objectives for this course. I have three. Many people miss opportunities to negotiate. The first step is for you to learn how to recognize opportunities to negotiate. All of the research in resilience and growth tells us that mindset is essential to learning new skills and becoming proficient. You are here because you have adopted a growth mindset. Now, I want you to adopt the kind of mindset that is going to make you a successful negotiator. The third learning objective is to make the shift from intuitive negotiating to intentional negotiating. More importantly, I want you to become a strategic negotiator. Strategic negotiators are successful negotiators and the model to which I'm going to introduce you will give you the structure to negotiate strategically. The fact is there are all kinds of opportunities to negotiate. Anytime you ask someone to do something or someone makes a request of you is an opportunity to negotiate. The key question is whether to negotiate. If you've had any exposure to young children or teenagers, you know they will negotiate every opportunity. As adults, we often go to the other extreme. We feel so pressed for time. We tend to default to a binary response. Someone makes a request and we feel pressured to answer yes or no right away. For example, a client asks us to work on a contract, a partner asks us to work on a brief, a colleague asks for help with research. We feel that we need to make a response immediately. If you think about it though, in only rare occasions do you have enough information to evaluate the request and make a binary determination. What if you just paused, took a breath, and asked a question? For example, a partner comes to you and asks if you will work on a specific project. Likely, you will feel pressured to answer yes. Given your current workload and deadlines, you may want to answer no. What if you took a moment and asked, "What would my role be?" Or "What are the deadlines for this?" Or "What makes me the best candidate to do this work?" Or "How do you see the project fitting into the priorities of my existing commitments?" So now that we've determined that perhaps there is something to negotiate, we wanna make sure that we're adopting the most effective mindset. The successful negotiating mindset maximizes value for the parties and requires engaging in a problem solving process with constructive collaboration. So when you approach a negotiation as a problem-solving process, it will in fact move you towards constructive collaboration. When you adopt an attitude or mindset, you know, of working with constructive collaboration, that will move you to a problem-solving process. Now, I realize that many people come to negotiation with a very competitive mindset. They have to win. And there are techniques to set boundaries and even engage them more collaboratively. At the most extreme example, this is what hostage negotiators do. For now, I just want you to realize that you will be more effective negotiating for yourself and for your clients if you focus on problem solving in negotiations. Now, we'll get to the model. There are two parts. The first consists of phases, the preparation phase and the engaging phase. The second part is a cycle that moves you between these phases. While some negotiations may be one and done, they are a minority. Most negotiations involve a number of interactions between the parties or, at the very least, you're negotiating with the same party over different matters. The preparation phase is what you do by yourself before you meet with your counterparty. The engagement phase is when you are in dialogue with your counterparty, whether in-person, by telephone, or on a video platform. If you are engaging by email or text, that is engaging, with preparation before and after each written exchange. Preparation's first step is research. Then you move from that to rehearse so that you can engage effectively with your counterparty. When you actually engage, that is relate. And immediately after each engagement, you need to reflect to inform how you will use research and rehearse to prepare again. Preparation is vital to negotiating successfully. Today, I'm going to focus on the first stage of the cycle, research. Research is such a significant step in the process that this hour is actually part two. In the first part, we focused on the three fundamentals of research: interests, options, and standards. I like to say that these three elements are like the three legs of a stool. If you master just these, you will become a more successful negotiator. If you haven't listened to that program yet, I recommend it. This hour assumes you have that knowledge and have practiced preparing for negotiations using it. So how to go from this stool to the chair, which is a much more substantial and stable way to sit. When negotiating, the two additions are people and BATNA, which I call the negotiator's secret, to complete research. In this hour, we will also consider how you apply this step of research and the concepts I'm teaching you to more complicated situations like when you are negotiating as part of a team or you are involved in a multi-party negotiation. To make this more relevant to you, I want you to think about a challenging negotiation from your own experience. It could be one you're facing now or anticipate having soon. Or it could be one you've recently concluded. Take a minute and think about this negotiation. Bring it to mind and really think about it. I'll be using different examples that I hope are relevant to you or effectively explain the concepts I'm describing. However, I want you to keep your negotiation top of mind and really think about how you would apply these concepts to it. As I said, we will be looking at two additional elements of research. The first of these is people because negotiation would be easy except for the people. Take a minute and think about your personal negotiation. Who are all the people involved in that negotiation? As you think about all the people involved in a negotiation, you may realize there are more people than you might initially name. For example, there is you. There is your counterparty. Now your counterparty may be one or more attorneys representing your client's opposing party or the other party in a transaction. Or the counterparty may be your client. It could be an expert or other service provider with whom you need to contract on behalf of your client's case. With respect to any of these parties, a fundamental question is, who else related to this party has an interest in the outcome of the negotiation? At the most basic level, if you are negotiating on behalf of your client with another attorney, each of your clients are those third parties. I like to call them stakeholders. Unlike a multi-party negotiation where there are a number of counterparties, I want you to think about the people who are interested but remain outside the negotiation. For example, in a merger for each organization, their executive teams, employees, shareholders, customers, and boards of directors may all be stakeholders of each party. Your client may be the organization as represented by the president. That person though may also have to negotiate internally with C-suite executives over how their operations may be affected by the outcome of the negotiations. Going from macro to micro, in a divorce, children, grandparents, or other relatives may be stakeholders in the negotiation who are vitally important or your opposing counsel's client. In any negotiation, there may be additional stakeholders for you or your client who have an interest in the outcome of the negotiations. Try to develop as thorough a sense of the stakeholders and their interests as you can. Be sure to do this for yourself and for your counterparty. You also wanna think about how you might research information about your counterparty that would be useful to you as you prepare for your negotiation. What are resources you can access and what is the value of the information they provide? Of course, now we have the internet, which can provide a wealth of information about both people and organizations with whom we negotiate and whom we represent. Let's focus first on your counterparty. For business negotiations, many people start with LinkedIn, which is often a wealth of information about a person with whom you are negotiating. You can find out information about their location or education that may be helpful for the small talk or establishing a relationship. You may also be able to get a sense of where the person fits in the organization's structure to try and get a sense of the scope of their authority. After LinkedIn, people may try doing a search on the internet more generally to see what comes up on social media platforms, in publications, and other media. You may also realize that your professional or personal network may be a source of information about the person or organization with whom you are dealing. As you gather this information about the person, think deeply about distinguishing between your hypotheses and assumptions. Especially when it comes to people, we reflectively jump to conclusions that more often than not are a function of bias rather than fact. For example, you may learn that your counterparty graduated from Harvard Law School. If you also graduated from Harvard, maybe you decide this person will naturally have certain characteristics that you associate with yourself as a fellow alum. However, what if your counterparty's experiences at Harvard were very different than yours? Or what if you graduated from another school and have very strong feelings about the difference between graduates of schools like the one you attended and people who went to Harvard? As you can see, it can become very complicated very quickly. If I'm telling you that your research may raise more questions than answers, why do I recommend it? I have two reasons. The first is that you may obtain some genuinely useful information through your research for when you are actually negotiating with them. The fact you want to learn about your counterparty will be helpful when you approach them with authentic interest. The second reason is that you will have to intentionally examine your own assumptions and biases before you are in the room, physical or virtual, with your counterparty. If you are aware of biases, you are less likely to make interpersonal mistakes arising from them. It is also very possible that you may find out this person comes from a different country or culture. You may be dealing with an organization based in another country with a native language other than English. Or you may be dealing with someone working for US organization for whom English is a second language. In the first case, you will want to educate yourself about cultural norms. Even if your counterparty is also aware of American norms, your effort to be courteous sends a signal of mutual respect that can be helpful if you make an inadvertent mistake. Let me give you an example from diplomacy. A high level American diplomat was negotiating with representatives from Saudi Arabia that included a member of the Royal family. Negotiations were going along very smoothly, until suddenly they weren't. As if a switch had been thrown, the atmosphere in the room grew suddenly cold. The diplomat had no idea what caused this. What he did know is that he needed to understand what had happened. Immediately, he called a break in the negotiations. He stepped out of the room and asked his translator if he had any idea what had happened to change the atmosphere. The translator told him that when the diplomat had crossed his legs, a very reflexive gesture, especially for Americans, he had pointed the sole of his shoe at the Saudi prince, which was a high insult in their culture. Armed with that information, the American diplomat went back after the break and offered a sincere apology to the Saudi royal prince for his insult. With the apology being sincere and the prince's understanding that the action of the diplomat had been inadvertent and unintentional, they were able to proceed with the negotiations successfully. In addition to cultural norms, when someone has an accent, it can trigger assumptions and biases for us. In your preparation for negotiating with non-native English speakers, consider what you can do to facilitate conversation. For example, you may wanna avoid idioms or slang. You may also want to consider your analogies or examples to make sure they make your point as simply and clearly as possible without relying on cultural references that are unique to the United States. While American culture is very pervasive, some might say invasive, being respectful of other cultures, including those within the United States, will help you negotiate more effectively. As we wrap up this section on people, some points to consider about creating a relationship based on your research are the following: Small talk is fine and can be useful. You need to be mindful though of how much small talk is culturally appropriate or is comfortable for the person with whom you're negotiating. Research has shown that frequent shorter contacts are better than long meetings for fostering reciprocity and cooperation. Finally, consider consulting before deciding during a negotiation. When you take the time to review what you think the understanding is and asking the other person if that reflects their understanding before you say the, "Okay, so we are agreed," or something like that, you will be modeling constructive collaboration. Now, we are going to explore the topic that sets strategic negotiators apart from everybody else. The element of research that I've discussed so far are probably things you already know to some extent. While you likely used different words or no words, you may well have always had a sense that there was something behind the demands people made in negotiations, interests behind positions. You tried different ideas to find solutions, options. You supported your proposals by pointing to what we call standards. And you were aware that misunderstandings with people could create problems in a negotiation. However, very few intuitive negotiators ever think about what they will do if they fail to reach agreement with their counterparty. 50 years ago, when social scientists began analyzing what made for an effective negotiator, it was this element of preparation that made the most difference. Researchers called this element BATNA, which stands for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. They found that individuals who thought deeply about what they would do if they were unable to reach a negotiated agreement and who thought about what their counterparty would do if there was no agreement consistently negotiated agreements that increased the value for both parties. Because this idea is counterintuitive, I want to spend time on it. I'm going to talk you through the process and provide a few examples to demonstrate how it works. The first step is to distinguish options from alternatives. I understand that in normal conversation, we use those terms interchangeably. As you prepare for negotiations, I want you to draw a clear distinction between these two terms. By way of review, options are possible agreements or parts of a larger agreement. The essential element of an option is that your intent is for it to be something to which your counterparty will agree. An option by definition represents some level of agreement with your counterparty. In contrast, an alternative is something you can implement without any involvement by your counterparty. It is what you will do if you are unable to reach agreement with your counterparty that satisfies your interests. An alternative is how you can satisfy your interests outside of the negotiation and without your counterparty in the negotiation. Here is a quick example. You need a car. You want to buy a Toyota Corolla that is an LE model, color red, no more than three years old. You've researched the price and determined that the range is 15 to $20,000. Your budget is such that you can afford to pay no more than $18,000 and would like to pay less. You do your research, find a car that fits your interest with an initial price of $22,000 at a dealership. You find another car that meets your interests, except that it is silver for 19,000 at another dealership. You go to the first dealership. After hours of negotiating, you are unable to get them below 19,000, which is currently your best option for an agreement at that dealership. Your alternatives are to: go to the dealership with the silver Corolla for $19,000 and see if you can negotiate that price down, or try to find a dealership with a red Corolla at a better price, or see if you can find a Corolla on Craig's list that meets your interests, or see if CarMax has a no-negotiation Corolla that fits enough of your interests, and so on. As you look at these alternatives, you need to decide which one is your best alternative. In any situation, it will depend on what your interests are and which ones are most important. If you are in urgent need of a car, you may go to a non-negotiation dealership and buy what they have in stock that meets your budget and gets you as close as possible to your other interests. If you are in no rush, you may decide that going to the other dealership with the silver Corolla is your BATNA. Here, the key point is you may pick only one alternative to be your BATNA. In your preparation, you need to do this BATNA analysis for yourself and you need to do it for your counterparty. In the car example, what is your counterparty's, the dealership's BATNA. If the dealership fails to reach agreement with you, it's alternative is to sell the car to somebody else. Making a sale to another customer is the dealership's BATNA. It's relative strength or weakness depends on how likely it can find another customer willing to pay more than $18,000. Depending on inventory and demand for a car with those characteristics, the dealership may have a relatively strong or a relatively weak BATNA. So the key to BATNA is thinking about what you will do if there is no agreement, what your counterparty will do if there is no agreement, and whether there is anything you can do to improve your BATNA or make their BATNA less attractive. Joshua Weiss, a professor of negotiation, in "The Book of Real-World Negotiations," has a great example of how using BATNA can mitigate what it first may appear to be a significant power imbalance. In this case, the buyer was a Chinese manufacturing company that sold specialized products domestically and abroad. Buyer was using outdated equipment and wanted to purchase new equipment in order to stay competitive. The only domestic supplier of the new equipment was a Chinese company operating under a government-granted monopoly. As the sole supplier, their selling price for the equipment was exorbitant. Because of import controls to protect Chinese domestic operations, importing the machinery from a foreign supplier was even more expensive. The buyer felt at a disadvantage in the negotiation and hired a consultant. The consultant challenged them to consider what they would do if the Chinese seller suddenly went out of business. This seemed to the buyer like an impossible task. How after sitting with the problem, they came up with several alternatives. One was to reengineer their processes to eliminate the need for the equipment. That would, of course, take time and money. Another was to find a supplier of similar equipment and see if it was possible to reengineer the equipment. They also thought of trying to find another company who had a used version of the equipment and see if they would sell it to buyer. The buyer was able to find a company that was willing to sell a used version of the newer equipment. This became their BATNA, their best alternative to a negotiated agreement. If they were unable to reach agreement with the seller for new equipment, they would buy used from this other company. The negotiating team went back with a counter offer significantly below seller's price. They were able to explain that while their first choice was new equipment from seller, they had found a source for a used machine. The seller realized that their only alternative was to lose the sale and its related revenue. With this more level playing field, the parties were able to continue their negotiations and ultimately reach an agreement that worked for both of them. This is an example of how a BATNA analysis can significantly change perceived leverage in a negotiation. It also shows how leverage can shift during a negotiation. Initially, the buyer had little or no leverage. By undertaking the analysis and doing some additional research and actually finding an alternative supplier, they significantly changed the leverage in the negotiation. I hope you can see how you as a lawyer can use the idea of BATNA to help change the leverage or improve your client's situation in a negotiation. There is a historical use of BATNA that I think is also an excellent illustration. If you look at the map in the slide, you'll see that the very small island of Malta is located smack in the middle of the Mediterranean sea. Before, during, and through World War II, Great Britain had maintained a treaty with Malta for a naval base on the island with a small airfield. In the 1960s, the treaty came up for renewal. The Cold War was raging. Strategy had shifted from sea to air, naval bases to air bases, and the runways on the British base were too small to accommodate modern war aircraft. The base was outdated. Britain perceived the base as having little value without a lot of investment to update it, which neither Britain nor Malta wanted to spend. Britain proposed a renewal of the base lease on the same terms with no increase in compensation to Malta. Malta would appear to have little or no leverage in this situation. Malta began to consider its alternatives to the proposed agreement with Great Britain. One alternative that Malta developed was to lease a base to the USSR who was always looking for warm water ports. A second alternative was to discuss with North African countries, the monetary value to them of Malta being completely neutral with no basis. Neither alternative was as attractive to Malta because the USSR could be domineering. It would be difficult to obtain coordination and consensus. Neither alternative was particularly attractive to Malta. The USSR could be domineering and it would be difficult to obtain coordination or consensus from the countries of the North African coast. Malta's BATNA, they determined, was to do a deal with the USSR. Once Great Britain realized that Malta had an alternative that involved a strategic advantage to the USSR, Britain reached out to NATO members to develop a better offer to Malta. Establishing a NATO base on Malta involved upgrading the facilities to make it work as an air base for modern aircraft, as well as a base for naval patrols by NATO in the Mediterranean Sea. So here's another example of how a BATNA analysis significantly changed the perceived leverage in a negotiation. To review, let's look at how Malta developed its BATNA. Malta really examined its alternatives and determined that it had ones that looked better than Great Britain's alternative of letting the base treaty lapse. While neither of Malta's alternatives, a treaty with the USSR or neutrality financed by countries of North Africa, was as beneficial to Malta as continuing its relationship with Great Britain, at the same time, Malta's BATNA of a treaty with the USSR in the context of the Cold War was extremely undesirable to Britain and the NATO allies. NATO was already coordinated and could make a meaningful treaty offer to Malta, which Malta accepted after some further negotiation. Let's come back to how you would apply this in your own legal practice. Think about the Chinese company example. The key to the situation was to look beyond the artificial limitations imposed by the client, that they only had one supplier. As an attorney, one of the most valuable services you can provide is to coach your client to identify their BATNA and look for ways to improve it. A second valuable service is to work with your client to identify the counterparty's BATNA. In this example, once the company had a viable alternative, which was to buy a used machine, the new machine manufacturer's BATNA was to make no sale. Thinking about it, who had the better BATNA then? To review, answer this question. Your BATNA is the same thing as your bottom line. True or false? The answer is false. Your bottom line presumes agreement with your counterparty. For this reason, it is an option. If your counterparty or you reach agreement at your bottom line, then you have an agreement and neither party needs to exercise their BATNA. On the other hand, the fundamental truth of your BATNA is that it represents a possible way you can achieve your interests to some extent in the absence of any participation by or involvement of your counterparty. Any agreement that is better than your BATNA is worth entering into even if it is lower than your bottom line. For this reason, the BATNA analysis will give you a much better understanding of just how important reaching agreement with your counterparty is for you or how important it is for your counterparty to reach agreement with you. Remember, I said, that leverage can change in a negotiation based on a BATNA analysis. Sometimes, more than that can change. One of the assignments I give my students is to prepare for a negotiation. They need to do their interests, their options, standards, research the people, and develop their BATNA. One of my students wanted to enter into a negotiation regarding the renewal of her apartment lease. As she researched her BATNA, one of the things she determined was that it was actually more advantageous for her to move than to stay where she was. While this isn't typical, it certainly is a possibility that only becomes available to you as a negotiator when you undertake a BATNA analysis. Using BATNA effectively means that you identify your alternatives to a negotiated agreement with your counterparty. Pick the alternative that meets your most important interests and over which you have the most control to make it happen. This is your BATNA. Identify your counterparty's alternatives to a negotiated agreement with you. Pick the alternative that meets your counterparty's most important interests as you estimate them and over which you believe your counterparty has the most control to make happen. This is your counterparty's BATNA. See if there is anything you can legitimately do to strengthen your BATNA or weaken your counterparty's BATNA. Put your BATNA away and focus in the negotiation on how you can maximize the value for both parties in terms of their interests. Before you commit to a final agreement with your counterparty, check to make sure it is better than your BATNA. Let's review what you've learned about the first part of the negotiation success model, which is research. In this hour, we added the two additional concepts of making sure you research people and develop your BATNA as well as your counterparty's BATNA. Now I wanna discuss next level applications of research preparation to negotiating as part of a team or in a multiparty negotiation. When negotiating as part of a team, preparation is even more important. There is work you need to do even before you begin doing the research analysis I've been discussing. The first step is to think through who needs to be on the team, both inside the room and outside the room. Who from your firm or legal division should the client be in the room? If you're representing an organization, what executives or staff need to be present or need to be on the negotiating team? Second, identify the roles for each member of the negotiation team. For people in the room, you wanna think through who's there to listen, who's there to speak, who are the subject matter experts, who is taking notes, who is there to check if every point has been covered, and so on. Depending on the team's size, members may double up on complimentary roles. For example, the person taking notes may also be the person checking to see if any issues of importance remain undiscussed. A third point is to consider how team members might divide up research responsibilities. Your client may be a good source of standards and stakeholders. As counsel, you may need to coach them through the process of identifying and prioritizing their interests, developing options, and undertaking a BATNA analysis. You also wanna make sure that the team does a thorough analysis of all the research elements for your counterparty. You will want to schedule or coordinate team meetings to discuss the elements of research and resolve any internal team negotiations before anyone engages with your counterparty. So think about the example of a significant negotiation for an organization. Internal stakeholders may be finance, procurement, and legal. The negotiation team may determine that legal is in the background unless or until a legal issue arises or the counterparty brings their attorneys to the table. Finance or procurement will be good sources of standards and options because of their experience of what has been effective in other similar negotiations. They also will be key to the BATNA analysis. It will often be the case, especially for lawyers who are internal to an organization or represent smaller companies, that one of your roles will be structuring and guiding the team through the negotiation. The more experienced you are with the elements of preparation, especially research, the more effective you will be in your negotiations on behalf of clients and in counseling clients through their negotiations. Negotiations that involve multiple parties also create complications when you're using this model. The first type of multiparty negotiation can occur in a two-party negotiation. In that case, the multiple party aspect relates to stakeholders or team members. As we've discussed, many business and personal negotiations involve negotiations with parties who have an interest in the outcome. For example, when buying a car, there may be negotiations that involve family members who will have only periodic use of the car or are passengers. In a two-party business negotiation, we've already talked about the negotiations that will probably need to happen within a team. Even when it is one person, you as counsel or you counseling a representative from the organization, internal negotiations with other divisions or departments may be necessary. Finally, as lawyers, we are often engaged in negotiations with clients even as we are also negotiating on their behalf. What I wanna focus on here is the second type of multiparty negotiation. This is one that involves more than two separate entities. Land use negotiations are a good example of these kinds of multiparty negotiations because they often require agreement between a number of parties who may have very different and conflicting positions. If you think about a land use or development project negotiation, it is likely to involve a number of interested parties, environmental or housing advocacy groups, landowners or nearby residents, local, state, or federal government entities, such as zoning boards or regulatory authorities, developers, business people, and so on. Each of these parties needs to undertake research on all the elements for itself and each of the other parties. While it may be possible to devise options or packages that work for everyone, it is more likely that this research analysis will enable a party to identify strategic coalitions it can make. Really thinking about each party's interests may provide opportunities to develop options that could resolve apparent conflicts between positions. Understanding each party's BATNA will help you understand leverage in the negotiation. As you begin to dig into your analysis, what you learn may be different than your original expectations. For example, an environmental group may initially appear to have little leverage. However, as you research further, you may see that it could significantly delay or even derail a project by exercising its BATNA of bringing a lawsuit. Expanding your research beyond your own positions, interests, options, standards, and BATNA is essential when negotiating in a multiparty context. Let's look at what we have covered today. I talked about the last two elements of research: people and BATNA, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. I have also shown how you can use the techniques of research in more complicated negotiations that involve teams or multiple counterparties. To help you retain what I've talked about, please take a moment and answer these questions. If you can or can wait until you are someplace where you can write down the answers, you will get the most out of this exercise. If you are unable to write your answers, at least take time to think about each question thoroughly before moving on to the next one. We focused today on how you prepare for people in a negotiation, how you develop and use BATNA effectively in negotiations, and using the research element of the negotiation success cycle to prepare for negotiating as part of a team or for multiparty negotiations. The first question is, what questions are still circling in your mind? What do you still want to know more about to be able to use research effectively in your practice? The second question is, what's squared with your values? What of the ideas that I've talked about resonate with you? Finally, what points stuck with you? What are you gonna be able to take away from this hour and start using immediately in your practice? The next part of this negotiation series looks at how you can prepare yourself to engage effectively with your counterparty. In the negotiation success cycle model, this means moving from research to rehearse. I look forward to taking you through that next section of the model. In the meantime, I urge you to practice. The only way you will become more effective as a negotiator is to practice the techniques that I've talked about in the first two hours of this program. It can be really helpful to practice in low stakes situations. There are many benefits to practicing in low stakes situations. First of all, if you make a mistake, it's a learning opportunity rather than a crisis. For that reason, you're also going to look for more opportunities to practice because mistakes have many fewer serious consequences. The more you practice anything, the more familiar it becomes and the more skilled you become in doing it. That means that as you develop your expertise and your experience, you will almost reflexively work through the elements of research whenever you are faced with a negotiation. Getting to that level of familiarity is what will make you a much more successful negotiator for yourself and for your clients. Thank you very much for your time and attention today. I wish you success in all your future negotiations.