Shark Week!!!

Posted By Saba Shatara, Sep 14, 2011

9/13/11

I want to start this blog post with a sort of silly admission: On a scale from 1 to 10, I am extremely excited that my second post falls right before Negotiation Week. Although “extreme excitement” might seem like too strong an emotion to feel towards series of school sponsored talks on negotiation, I assure you it is not.  There are two reasons for my enthusiasm: 1) Nothing I’ll write on is nearer and dearer to our school, particularly to the 1Ls, and 2) “Shark Week” (as it has come to be affectionately known among the King Hallers) was my first real exposure to negotiations and the King Hall Negotiation Team.

To give you some background: the primary purpose of Shark Week is to give the King Hall community an opportunity to hear speakers on a range of topics, from settlement and transactional negotiations to an introduction on negotiation competitions. This, we hope, will give the student body a chance to prepare for (and get excited about) our annual Intra-School Negotiations Competition. We have esteemed professors, judges, practitioners and even recent bar-takers coming in to give you the knowledge you need to succeed.

 Now that that’s out of the way, let me get to the hard sell. 1Ls: There are not many activities that you can participate in that don’t involve cite checking and blue booking. Now as fun as those activities are, they do not compare with the thrill of working with a partner to make offers, counter offers, reason with the opposition and hold to a bottom line. Negotiation Week is designed to give you some proverbial negotiation “skillz,” as well as an opportunity to practice before our competition.

 Aside from the competition, Shark Week highlights the important reality that much of today’s lawyering revolves around negotiation. It is an important ability to have when dealing with settlements, plea bargains, and all sorts of transactional practices (just to name just a few applications). This is a chance for the entire campus to brush up on one of a practitioner’s most useful tools: the art of negotiation.

Finally, Shark Week is fun. As I said above, our Negotiation Week was the first opportunity I had to see KHNT in action. It began my whirl-wind love affair with all things KHNT and eventually put me in the position to write these excited and way to long – I promise they get shorter – blog posts for you all. If you give it a chance, like I did a year ago, you might also get “bitten by the shark” (I know it’s lame – I’m trying to start something here, just go with me). And isn’t that the best reason to come to Shark Week?

Attend “Shark Week” at NOON every day the week of 9/19

Sept. 19 - Room 1001 - Settlement Negotiations with Professor Imwinkelreid

Sept. 20 - Room 1001 - Mediation Advocacy with Joe Ramsey, a professional arbitrator and pro tem Superior Court judge

Sept. 21 - Room 1001 - Preparing for Negotiations with Professor Shestowsky

Sept. 22 - Room 1001 - Transactional Negotiations with Nicole Soluri of Downey Brand and Scott Bartel of Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell. 

Sept. 23 - Room 1001 – Intro to Negotiations Competitions with Rachel Ray and Jesse Suarez