How to Win Negotiation's | Adam Jackson

I always like to say strategists have some of the most interesting minds and insights out of all the professionals out there.

Today is no exception - I had the pleasure of speaking to the Director of Strategy at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, Adam Jackson.

He had some invaluable insights on creating strategies, common mistakes, and negotiating (based on his two decades of experience practicing law).

Although this interview was supposed to focus on strategy, it ended up becoming a masterclass on negotiating. Which is still super valuable for all the professionals out there.

Stick around because these insights aren’t from an armchair philosopher but 20+ years of negotiating as a lawyer & strategist.

Let’s get into it!

Q: What are some lessons you’ve learned about strategy from practicing law for over two decades?

So the big thing you learn as a lawyer is it's extremely important to be prepared for things. A lot of lawyers go into negotiations, for example, and they go in under prepared. There's no substitute for preparation. You will have your opposition for toast if you are well prepared. That's one thing.

The second thing I learned from that experience was in negotiation, you really want to be at least leading the person you're negotiating with to believe that they are getting value as well. Nobody's going to concede if they think they've just lost the negotiation.

So identifying things that you can concede and that, you know, are valuable to the other side and appearing reluctant to concede those things is an extremely important skill.

A lot of non lawyers end up going into negotiations and really trumpeting the fact that they've won the negotiation and taking pleasure from making the other side feel like they've completely lost it.

So I've carried that through my career. I always look for things that I can concede, while making sure I appear reluctant to concede so that make the other side feel like it's a win win outcome.

Often in my current role, when I'm in a negotiation with somebody and there's somebody else there, they're worried that I'm being a bit soft and they don't understand that I'm doing it deliberately so that I get the things that I really want.

Q: When it comes to making strategic concessions, how do you decide which concessions to make?

The best things to identify are things that actually do matter to you a bit, but that, you know, ultimately that you will probably lose on.

You identify those early and you pretend to be reluctant to concede those points and you fight them a bit, but you ultimately give them up.

You might say something like in the interests of kind of getting to an agreement, well, we can maybe move on this a bit. Don't go there immediately, maybe give a half concession first.

But finding those things that everybody knows they are quite valuable to you, but you know that you won't win on that point. Those are the best ones.

Second best are things that you don't care about. With this, you've really got to try and make the other side think that you care more than you do about those things and that can be a bit harder.

You've got to be very careful that you don't kind of undermine your own credibility on those ones. If they think that you're pretending to, if they understand your game, then you lose your impact.

Sometimes you have to identify those on the fly. Sometimes you go into a negotiation thinking that you will be able to get something and you realize quite quickly that the other side will not concede it and that they really have to leverage to get what they want on that.

But often your preparation can identify those things and as a lawyer, the preparation part is particularly important because often you need to get your client over the line on those things before the negotiation because you don't have the authority to concede them otherwise.

Q: What does your process of preparing for a negotiation look like?

I tend to look through whatever the materials are for the negotiation. If it's a legal negotiation, it could be a contract, for example, or a draft contract. If it's just a corporate negotiation, maybe even internally, then it just might be a written plan that I have and I work out what I want from it.

Then I think about if I was in the other person's position. What would I be arguing on those points? Like, first of all, what would I want? But secondly, what would my arguments be?

So, in a contract, the arguments might be around a legal risk, for example. So they might be coming in and saying, we can't take that legal risk. So there's no way we could concede that point, because we simply can't take that legal risk.

Then the preparation is working out what might be wrong about those arguments. So, in a contract, that's often about doing some legal research on those specific points.

For example, in a lot of contract negotiations, you'll have a negotiation about the liability clauses, everybody in a commercial contract wants to limit their liability to certain risks, and they want to put that into the contract.

A lot of the clauses that are used by lawyers and contracts, surprisingly, they don't actually understand what they mean. You'd be very surprised. 90% of lawyers don't understand their own limitation liability provisions.

If you can really understand the law behind how that liability would work then you can win the point. For example, there is a concept called consequential loss, which most people don't understand.

If you understand the law behind that, and you can reference legal cases and that sort of thing, then you can force the other side to concede it, simply because they don't want to look like they don't know what you're talking about.

So you can anticipate that they will say, our client can't take on this consequential loss risk and you can kind of say, well, give us some examples of what that could look like for your client and they give an example and say, well, that actually wouldn't be a consequential loss, because, as you would know, if you'd read the Oceania furniture case, this actually is how the law would apply to those facts.

That level of preparation is what wins you negotiations. It's a lot more subtle in negotiations that aren't legal ones. It might be around just thinking through what the arguments are and what the logical flaws are, and finding maybe similar situations where you think that same person would argue differently and having those at your fingertips. But it's all about thinking about what the arguments will be and how you might win them.

Q: Negotiating can often be nerve-racking, how do you manage all the emotions associated with the process?

I always think of a way to essentially pause the negotiation on a particular point that I think I might lose, rather than just losing it at the time, and knowing that I have the ability to do that is a big stress reliever.

It's a skill that you develop over time. So you know that if things get hard, you have a way of just putting it on pause. You can go away and think about it some more and develop a new strategy.

For example, if you are negotiating for a bank and you're negotiating to lend money to somebody. Banks have got quite complicated rules around what they're allowed to lend and what conditions they're allowed to lend under.

They have departments that manage those rules called credit departments. So you can always sort of say, oh, look, I just don't think our credit department would agree to this, so I'm going to need to go away and talk to them a bit more about that.

That's an example of a way that you kind of put the negotiation on hold around a point that you feel like you're losing. That for me, is a big stress reliever, knowing how I'm going to pause a negotiation if I have to, and what I will do to buy myself a bit more time.

Because the fear you have is that something really unexpected comes up in the negotiation, something you haven't thought of, and suddenly you're the one who's unprepared and on the spot and backpedaling and trying not to look stupid.

Q: What are some strategic mistakes you see firms make all the time?

The first one is it's very common for people to try to be everything to everybody. If you take the example of a law firm, for example, they will almost never turn away clients. They will always try to service all clients.

Their view is if there's somebody who's come to us that's willing to pay us money, that's great. The consequence of that is that a lot of businesses end up with value propositions that are just the same as each other and they're trying to go about it the same way.

So if you're a law firm and you're trying to recruit the smartest graduates, you're all trying to get the same graduates and you're all trying to get the same other lawyers in the market, you're all trying to get the same clients and, and you're all saying the same things about yourself.

For example, in New Zealand we would be saying, we're a top tier New Zealand law firm and everybody says, so if you're going to really succeed, you really need to work out where you have a natural advantage or can build a natural advantage.

So you might say, oh, we want to become a specialized banking firm. So you might say, we're going to tell everybody that we're really great at banking law and we're going to tell all the graduates that we're great at banking law.

But the really hard part is taking that to the next level, which is choosing not to do things. So making the choice, therefore, if you're going to be a banking law firm, to turn away clients that aren't banking clients, and to turn away that work, and not to also do a bit of litigation or a bit of commercial or a bit of employment, but to just concentrate on your thing.

This also gives you the discriminating advantage, that means that when you're competing for those same graduates, you're letting a whole lot of the others go and just concentrating your resources on the ones that you think will be really good at banking while your competitors will be trying to get everybody, and so you will win on the banking ones and leave them to scrap over the rest.

It’s the same with the clients. Your discretionary time to go and brand or network is spent just on a narrower set of clients instead of trying to do everybody. A lot of people don't get that. They form the trap of trying to do too much for everybody. Most importantly, they don't have the courage to not do things.