Max Bazerman

And sometimes there are also children involved who suffer as a result of the animosity between parties.

I think we should also think about the fact that the longer the process goes on and the more legal activity that occurs, the more expensive the process is to both parties.

So one interesting issue is when you raise the temperature in the negotiation, out of some sort of desire to harm the other party, how are they going to respond in a quick fashion?

answer is that they're likely to reciprocate.

And all of a sudden, now we're not getting anything out of our venting toward the other party.

We're simply increasing the emotional grief we suffer and we're increasing the costs that it's going to take to resolve the dispute.

But one role that mediators can play, mediators are simply people with negotiation skills who help two parties reach agreement.

One of the nice parts about the use of a mediator is that they can bring down the temperature and bring reasonableness to both sides of the negotiation.

So one viable answer to our divorce attorney is that when things get particularly tough, that may be a good time to bring in a skilled mediator.

That's right.

So imagine that you have a divorcing couple and their family wealth is a half a million dollars, $500,000.

And they could amicably reach a resolution and they could divide it $250,000 each.

Or maybe one side would get $200,000, another side would get $300,000 for a variety of reasons that could be justified.

But if instead we spend a year and a half fighting through the court system and we're paying lawyers along the way and we incur $200,000 of legal expenses, now there's only $300,000 to divide in addition to the fact that we've hurt the emotional connection between the two parties that could have all kinds of repercussions.

If there were children involved...

All of that hostility is likely to have a negative effect on the children as well.

So figuring out how to get to a wise agreement efficiently and getting over the emotional barriers can be critical to coming up with a wise agreement.

I love Kathy's story, and it's in a context that a lot of people describe as their least favorite negotiation.

People don't like buying cars broadly.

So I think that Kathy did two things that are just terrific.