Tanzania negotiations training

It was in a cold December when I signed up to participate in the New Perimeter Project to train Tanzanian government lawyers in international negotiations.  It was a wet and cold spring when I left for Dar es Salaam and was pleasantly met by the warming African sun; this lasted all of 30 minutes before the rain started. England suddenly seemed quite a dry place after all.

Negotiation skills are learnt through experience not by reading textbooks. It was here that we were so fortunate that one of the DLA Piper team members was Jay Finkelstein (Northern Virginia). He has been teaching a course for over 10 years at the American University using an extended simulated negotiation of a business transaction. Jay somehow managed to cram a semester's worth of teaching into a weeklong timetable for New Perimeter.

The simulation was based around a fictional multinational looking to source a secure supply of copper ore from the fictional African state, Malundi. The students were all senior government lawyers involved in negotiating governmental contracts and it was immediately obvious that this course was going to be very effective. Some were assigned to be negotiators on behalf of the multinational, the others for the state-owned copper company.

The DLA Piper team was a reminder of the company’s scale and footprint. In addition to Jay, there were Fredrik Lindblom (Oslo), Marilyn Pearson (Chicago), Michael Bosco (Rome), Cris Farrar (Houston), Martin Navias (London), Irene Schmid (Berlin), Patience Bin (Hong Kong) and me (Leeds). There was also Sara Andrews (New York), Senior International Pro Bono Counsel, who managed the project.

Each day started early with a bumpy car journey to the brand new, and very impressive, Law School of Tanzania along an unsurfaced road made yet more uneven by the heavy rain. The mornings were dedicated to teaching the various skills and art of negotiation based around the simulation facts and the DLA Piper team took turns to deliver the different topics. 

Each side was divided into four smaller parallel negotiation teams of 3 or 4 lawyers and one DLA Piper facilitator, with the aim of concluding a deal in principle by the end of the week. The afternoons were spent with our smaller teams formulating strategies, drafting correspondence and face-to-face negotiations which were often intense and overran the scheduling. My team, negotiating on behalf of the 'Malundian Copper Corporation', was highly engaged, negotiating hard against their opposite numbers. My role in the negotiations was not to participate directly but to facilitate, give momentum to the negotiations and offer suggestions based on my own experience. Although some teams did reach agreement by the Friday, mine didn’t – it came to the valid decision that the right thing to do was to walk away rather than agree to a bad bargain just for the sake of a conclusion.

I returned to Leeds with a sense of real achievement and the belief that I had made a substantial contribution.  In addition, I have been reminded what wonderful experiences and opportunities can come from meeting people from other cultures both in Tanzania and from around the firm.