El blog de Maria

This has been my favourite reading of my daily Legal Today´s newsletter. An interesting contribution of Jorge Palacios Plaza, BA in Political Science and Sociology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He explains how in the daily practice of law, emotional intelligence is an interesting tool.

In order to pay attention to our emotional intelligence we need to work on:  

Self-awareness: The way our emotions affect our conduct. Strengths and weaknesses and ways to improve.

Self-management of our emotions: so we do not get easily overwhelmed by moment´s emotion, focusing in objectives more than in obstacles.

Positive and optimistic behavior

Recognition of others´emotions.

I agree that much energy, worries, euros, paper and hours of Court would be saved if we, lawyers, would obligatorily  submit to modern codes of professional conduct inspired by Goleman and co ( Masters of the Emotional Intelligence stuff). This goes to Law Societies.

I always perceive lots of defensiveness and aggressiveness in the counterparty, and I think it is just because we are not sure about the willingness to negotiate and flexibility of the opposite. We are deformed by overuse of force and are afraid to end up being the weak part of the negotiation if we are flexible.

It is definitely necessary to reinforce and  spread the negotiating style with clear and fair game rules so that both parties can be  comfortable in their role as negotiators. We may need to start practising this style with our counterparties in our daily professional hours: the good is diffusive, said Thomas Aquinas.
 
The current crisis, which demands quicker solutions, the overloading of the courts, the need of  a fast and general restore of economy that is within our main worries today,  are heavy reasons to a change from litigiousness to negotiation  through flexibility and self-confidence.

Win-win schemes again: there is a famous judicial motto in Spain which writes: “A bad deal is better than a good lawsuit." I would say… there is never a bad deal if it avoids a litigation.

Be confident.

Maria

Olas en la Bahía: Bay Waves by Xavier Fargas at Flickr.com