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MAXWELL EN-ROUTE PODCAST - THE ART OF NEGOTIATION: WHY NEGOTIATION, AND WHY NOW
By Karen Tan – January 2026
INTRODUCTION
Negotiation remains one of the least taught skills in legal training and practice. It is not something the profession spends much time, let alone training for in a deliberate way. Lawyers negotiate every day, on contracts, procedural directions, settlements, costs, timelines, and strategy. Much of this happens almost by habit. It is often not labelled as negotiation at all, and it is frequently done without the opportunity to step back and consider how it could be done more effectively. Season Two of Maxwell En Route grew out of this observation.
That gap matters more now than it might have in the past. Courts, arbitral tribunals, and dispute resolution institutions around the world are under increasing pressure. Caseloads are rising, disputes are becoming more complex, and costs continue to grow. As a result, clients are no longer focused only on whether a legal position is technically correct. They are asking whether outcomes make commercial sense, whether they are workable in practice, and whether they allow people and organisations to move forward. In this environment, negotiation is not an optional add on. It is a core part of what it means to practise well.
For this season, we brought together practitioners working across different parts of the dispute resolution landscape to talk candidly about negotiation as they experience it in practice. Not as a single skill used at the end of a dispute, but as a discipline that informs how problems are framed, how conversations are managed, and how decisions are made. Across these conversations, a consistent theme emerges. Effective negotiation is rarely about winning an argument. It is about understanding what really matters to the people involved, managing process carefully, and working towards outcomes that parties can accept and live with.
INSIGHTS from the Industry
Dr. Claudia Winkler
Founder and CEO, Negotiation Academy
Anu Ambikaipalan, Associate General Counsel APAC, Uber
- Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6PDfdQo5pkAuS4xl3vXsff?si=oStjA6M2TG6SUOKTDMqfRw
- Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mFL9rqY5fM
AI became an indispensable yet often unnoticed force driving modern technology. In the first episode of Maxwell En-route, Anu Ambikaipalan discussed how AI had long powered essential services like ridesharing and food delivery. While its role in improving efficiency and convenience was undeniable, the rapid advancements and heightened scrutiny of AI in late 2023 accelerated urgent regulatory challenges. Striking a balance between innovation, safety and consumer trust required close collaboration between tech companies and regulators.
Beyond grappling with this rapid growth in technology, businesses had to navigate the complexities of a fragmented global landscape. Regulatory approaches varied across regions due to differing values and priorities. For multinational companies, this meant adapting to diverse legal frameworks while ensuring compliance. At the same time, sustainability emerged as another critical challenge, with organisations working to integrate AI solutions while addressing the high energy demands of these systems.
Despite these challenges, Ambikaipalan emphasised that the opportunities AI presented far outweighed the risks. Its ability to streamline processes across sectors, including compliance in legal teams, demonstrated its potential to boost productivity and reduce errors. While concerns over AI-driven job displacement persisted, history showed that technology often reshaped roles rather than eliminated them, reinforcing the importance of continuous reskilling. Amid these changes, Ambikaipalan highlighted that fostering empathy and human connection remained vital, ensuring technology continued to enhance rather than replace meaningful human interactions.
BACK TO THE FUNDAMENTALS
Dr Claudia Winkler’s episode confronts a foundational misconception within the legal profession namely that lawyers are, by default, effective negotiators. While lawyers are trained extensively in legal analysis and advocacy, Winkler argues that these skills do not automatically translate into successful negotiation. Persuading a judge is fundamentally different from persuading a counterparty.
She adds that there is a clear distinction between positions and interests. Clients typically arrive with firm positions, often framed in legal terms, but these positions frequently conceal deeper commercial, relational, or emotional drivers. Unless lawyers take responsibility for uncovering these underlying interests through structured listening and questioning, they risk steering disputes prematurely in the wrong direction and overlooking solutions that better serve the client’s objectives.
Winkler also highlights the importance of preparation as a negotiation discipline, not an afterthought. Tools such as BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement), decision trees, risk assessment, and ZOPA (Zone of Possible Agreement) analysis are not theoretical abstractions; they are practical instruments that help lawyers calibrate expectations, advise clients realistically, and avoid the common trap of arriving at only one solution. Without this analytical grounding, negotiations stall or collapse; not because agreement is impossible, but because the negotiation has been poorly framed.
Perhaps most challenging for lawyers is the reality that negotiation cannot be separated from emotion. Feelings of injustice, betrayal, or loss often dominate decision-making and legal arguments alone rarely shift them. Effective negotiators must therefore learn to engage with the “matters of the heart” without becoming counsellors, acknowledging emotion as a legitimate negotiation variable rather than an inconvenient distraction.
George Lim SC
Chairman, Singapore International Mediation Centre
FROM WINNING CASES TO SOLVING PROBLEMS
George Lim SC’s reflections trace the evolution of dispute resolution practice in Singapore from adversarial litigation to structured mediation. Having begun his career as a litigator, Lim describes how mediation revealed an alternative conception of justice; one focused not on retrospective fault-finding, but on prospective problem-solving.
A recurring theme in his contribution is the transformative role of the neutral. While lawyers have long negotiated informally on behalf of clients, mediation introduces an independent facilitator who can reality-test assumptions, manage emotional dynamics, and reframe discussions when positional bargaining hardens. This shift often allows parties to move beyond entrenched legal arguments and consider outcomes that courts are not designed to deliver.
Lim’s case studies vividly illustrate how mediation operationalises interest-based negotiation. Whether in commercial disputes, shareholder fallouts, or personal injury claims, he shows that outcomes anchored solely in damages often fail to resolve the underlying conflict. By contrast, mediated solutions (such as apologies, clean exits or revised commercial arrangements) can restore relationships or address what really matters to the parties and allow disputes to end with clarity and finality.
His account of the POSCO FuelCell Energy mediation demonstrates negotiation at its most sophisticated. A long-running, multi-forum dispute transformed into a renewed commercial relationship through careful preparation, cultural sensitivity, and disciplined process management. Equally instructive is his emphasis on tone and environment. Small human gestures that disarm hostility and make dialogue possible.
Lim’s ultimate proposition is that mediation allows parties to retain control over outcomes and to accept responsibility for the solutions they design.
Ye-Min Wu
Regional Director, Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue
NEGOTIATION WHEN THE OBJECTIVE IS DURABLE PEACE
Ye-Min Wu’s perspective expands negotiation beyond commercial and legal disputes into the realm of diplomacy and humanitarian conflict. While the foundational principles of negotiation remain constant, she highlights how context, and consequence fundamentally alter negotiation design when the objective is not settlement, but durable peace.
Her contribution is particularly valuable in illustrating the role of context and inclusion. Resistance in negotiations (whether by states or communities) is often misinterpreted when broader socio-economic realities are ignored. Durable agreements require not only technical solutions, but a sense of legitimacy and ownership among those who must live with the outcome.
Wu introduces the ACCP (Actors, Context, Content, Process) framework as a reminder that negotiation sequencing is rarely linear. Trust-building may precede substance; process design may determine whether substance can even be discussed. In fragile environments, negotiation often proceeds indirectly, with local actors and other informal channels playing a decisive role.
Her reflections also emphasise the ethical dimension of negotiation: influence brings responsibility. Whether in diplomacy or dispute resolution, the goal is not to impose outcomes, but to create conditions in which coexistence is possible.
Natalie Morris-Sharma
Senior Director, Singapore’s Attorney-General’s Chambers
NEGOTIATION AT SCALE
Natalie Morris-Sharma’s episode offers a masterclass in multilateral negotiation, drawing on her experience chairing the negotiations that led to the Singapore Convention on Mediation. Her insights reveal negotiation as disciplined leadership under pressure: managing process, maintaining fairness and sustaining trust across diverse and often competing interests.
Multilateral negotiations differ not because interests disappear, but because scale, visibility, and political accountability intensify every decision. Procedures, precedents, and process choices can either unlock consensus or entrench division. In such settings, the individual negotiator’s credibility, consistency, and judgment becomes pivotal.
Morris-Sharma’s snowstorm anecdote illustrates negotiation at its most practical. Preserving momentum, safeguarding transparency, and attending to human needs in order to secure agreement. Her approach reflects an understanding that negotiation outcomes are often shaped by factors invisible in the final text.
Her insistence on procedural neutrality, even amid geopolitical imbalance, reinforces a central lesson of the season: negotiation legitimacy depends as much on how decisions are made as on what decisions are reached.
NEGOTIATION AS A CORE PROFESSIONAL DISCIPLINE
Season Two of Maxwell En-Route reframes negotiation as a foundational legal skill, one that cuts across litigation, mediation, arbitration, diplomacy, and policy-making. The common thread across all episodes is that effective negotiation requires intentional design at the start, not the end. It requires a clarity of purpose, disciplined preparation, sensitivity to context, and respect for the human dimension of conflict.
For the dispute resolution community, the message is clear. Mastery of legal doctrine alone is no longer sufficient. Clients expect lawyers to navigate complexity, manage risk, and deliver outcomes that reflect commercial reality and human consequence. Negotiation is the bridge between legal rights and practical resolution.
In that sense, the Art of Negotiation is not simply the theme of a podcast season. It is an invitation to the profession to treat negotiation as a skill to be built, refined and taken seriously, because it influences not only outcomes, but relationships, credibility and trust in the justice system itself.
