Key Note Speaker for 2018 State Bar Collaborative Law Conference

Responding to participant feedback from previous years’ conferences, the Planning Committee for the upcoming annual Collaborative Law Conference is excited to announce a special key note speaker – Peter Robinson, Professor and Managing Director of the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine University. Professor Robinson will educate this year’s course participants on the topic of advanced negotiation skills. In addition to managing the renowned program at Pepperdine and teaching there, Professor Strauss has taught both nationally and internationally at various other universities and been invited to present before numerous legal groups, including with JAMS, the ABA Dispute Resolution Section and Judicial Section, and the Harvard Negotiation Project. He is also an accomplished author, having been published in the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution, and the Baylor Law Review, to name a few. He was bestowed with the Peacemaker of the Year Award by the Southern California Mediation Association in 2000.

At our conference, Professor Robinson will help collaborative law practitioners gain a better understanding of clients’ instinct to engage in traditional anchoring and compromise negotiation despite our insistence to engage in interest-based negotiation, and more importantly, how to help clients avoid that natural tendency. He will further teach us advanced techniques to foster that interest-based problem-solving creativity we offer to clients as a benefit of the collaborative divorce process. In addition, Professor Robinson will share his insights resulting from his current work on the importance of apology and forgiveness in the dispute resolution process. Not only will Professor Robinson present his teachings on advanced negotiation, but he will help us put that knowledge to work by having all attendees participate in an interactive case study, integrating those skills into real world workings for the conference participants. This is a presentation you won’t want to miss.