Personal Injury Negotiations Stockton CA

Personal Injury Negotiating: The First Thing You Gotta Know

Author: Rex Bush

The first principle of personal injury negotiating is: ask for more than you expect to get.

To apply this correctly you need to know what your case is worth but that's a whole other article.

Once you have a ball park idea of your case's value multiply it by three for example. Use that as your starting point. I like to think of it as an "invitation to negotiate."

Roger Dawson is one of the country's top experts on negotiation. He is founder of the Power Negotiating Institute and the author of "Secrets of Power Negotiating." The audio version of his book has sold over 548 thousand copies, is one of Nightingale-Conant's top sellers and is one of the best selling business audio programs ever published.

If you read his book-which I highly recommend-you will find in Chapter 1, that his very first principle is "Ask for More Than You Expect to Get."

Henry Kissinger put it like this: "Effectiveness at the conference table depends upon overstating one's demands.

Why would you want to ask for more than you expect to get?

1) It allows room to negotiate. You can always come down but you can never-or almost never-go back up once you have named a number.

At a mediation recently we learned that the other side was still considering our position to be the last number we gave before we filed suit a year earlier. A lot more was known about her physical condition and it was a lot worse than we had thought before filing suit. Finding out that our demand was twice the pre-suit amount, the other side was ready to walk out.

It took some careful work by a very skilled mediator to get them to stay.

2) Their valuation might actually be higher than yours.

Though rare in my business it does happen occasionally that the other side puts a higher value on the case than you expect. Starting with demand number much higher than your valuation allows them to come in at a number higher than yours.

My law school classmate Mel Smith used to say "the first one to name a number loses." Asking for more than you expect is a way of naming a number without naming a number.

3) It increases the perceived value of your case.

By asking for a lot you cause the other side to begin to see your case as valuable.

4) It sets the stage for settlement

Asking for more than you expect sets the stage for you to come down (to your true valuation) and the other side feels they have had a success and got a good bargain.

Robert Cialdini in "Influence-Science and Practice" describes this as "perceptual contrast."

"There is a principle in human perception, the contrast principle, that affects the way we see the difference between two things that are presented one after another. Simply put, if the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend to see it as more different than it actually is."

You have made your opening demand fairly different by asking for a lot more than you expect. This makes your case seem more valuable and also allows the other side to take a huge win from the fact that they were able to settle the case much lower than the opening number.

Downside

A downside of asking for more than you expect is that sometimes you won't be taken seriously by your opponent. Your demand may be too far out of their conceptual ballpark. In that case they might make a very low offer in response or not make an offer at all.

The solution? Communication. Talk to them. Ask what is going on. Why aren't they offering? Or, why are they offering so little? They'll tell you and that will give you the clue to your next move.

Summary

Ask for more than you expect to get. You just might be surprised and at the very least you have set the stage for a successful resolution.

About the Author:
Rex Bush is founder of Bush Law Firm near Salt Lake City, Utah where he handles personal injury cases in Utah and throughout the United States and Canada. For information on personal injury issues visit his website: Utah Personal Injury Attorney

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