1 PerspectiveNovember 7, 2008

Better Settlements From Better Information: Early Case Assessments IV

“You can pay them, or you can pay me.  But don’t pay us both.”  My friend Robert Manley told me that as we sent him a new lawsuit a few years ago, and his quote sums up one of Early Case Assessments’ biggest benefits.  As we have discussed before, getting your ECA done — gathering the information required by the Early Case Assessment Checklist discussed in Part II and Part III of this series — requires an up-front investment.  This post will tell you why, if you plan to settle your case, a thorough Early Case Assessment will be worth that investment.

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Categories: ECA,Miscellaneous,Negotiation,Settlement,Strategy,Tactics

2 PerspectivesNovember 4, 2008

A Bird in the Hand: Just Send a Check to Settle Your Case

I have an old friend who told me how one of his plaintiffs’ cases — the one sure to go to trial — finally got resolved:  ”They kept hitting me with bigger and bigger checks until I had to settle.” He has a great story, but this post isn’t about settling big cases with big checks.  It’s about settling smaller cases with even smaller checks.

I recently wrote Non-Binding Arbitration:  Get Your Day in Court Without One Day in Court.  In that post I wrote how you can use a non-binding case evaluation to break your impasse:  ”The arbitrator issued his [nonbinding opinion], the parties immediately used it to frame their negotiations, and — after one more tactic from the other side that I’ll post about soon — we got the case settled.”   This post is about that “one more tactic.” More…

Categories: Negotiation,Settlement,Tactics

Add Your PerspectiveOctober 31, 2008

What Can Yard Signs Teach Us About Negotiation?

As a wide-eyed sophomore in charge of a campus political campaign in 1984 I pushed bumper stickers and buttons into the hands of as many supporters as possible to sway the undecided — if I could blanket the campus with my candidate’s bumper stickers, undecided voters would follow the lead of their neighbors and support him too, right?  But is that really why campaigns print bumper stickers? More…

Categories: Negotiation,Settlement

Add Your PerspectiveOctober 28, 2008

Putting the Checklist into Action: Early Case Assessments Part III

In Part II of this series we outlined the 15 elements of the Early Case Assessment checklist, but a checklist alone isn’t enough.  How an ECA works in practice — actually getting what’s on the ECA checklist done — isn’t quite the paint-by-numbers exercise it might seem to be.  The following are 4 important ideas, admittedly based on mistakes I have made, that will make your ECA efforts more effective.

1.  Agree on the Goal

The logical starting point for any case assessment is to gather the facts, but I have learned the hard way that a quick dash for the facts isn’t really where to start.  Since the effort will require information, documents and cooperation from a number of people, the first step in an Early Case Assessment is to educate witnesses and stakeholders immediately that delay is no longer the strategy. Whether the client is a first-time litigant or frequently defends cases, everyone involved needs to understand that the company will be giving management, or the firm will be giving its client, a full report on the case by January 12th (or whatever date you pick). We won’t be waiting for three months for the “legal wrangling” this time. More…

Categories: Communication,ECA,Fundamentals,Miscellaneous