Client Commercial Negotiations: Make Your Mark with the Right Mindset

Disclaimer: Nothing in this article or on this website constitutes legal advice. Readers should speak with their attorneys for any advice pertaining to any particular legal matter. I am not a lawyer and this is for general information purposes only.

During contract negotiations with clients, there's little better than having a talented, experienced commercial lawyer driving negotiations on your side. In a previous operations role, I managed an all-star legal department that brought deep industry experience, highly relevant legal knowledge, and a wonderfully collaborative culture.

Even with this great team, I found that the most beneficial outcomes came when, as a business leader, I actively participated in these negotiations.

By helping the legal team to deeply understand the drivers of project profitability and working together to map out our negotiating leverage on a case-by-case basis, we developed an incredible shorthand. They felt significantly more connected to the business but I also learned some powerful negotiating techniques myself.

One of the biggest contributions you can make to your negotiating team even as a novice negotiator is to bring the right mindset: self-respect.

In fact, I think the foundation for any and all commercial negotiations is self-respect.

You believe in yourself. You have a great team. You work for a great company, and your services are superb. I’m not talking about egotism or arrogance (which can lead to sub-optimal outcomes or even derail a negotiation entirely). I just mean that you carry an unwavering belief that you’ve earned your place at the table.

This mindset enables you to engage meaningfully with both your own team and your clients. When you have self-respect, you know intrinsically that your negotiating partners may have had other options but they chose your business for a reason. They want to work with you.

So if their legal team emails you their "non-negotiable" horribly lopsided Services Agreement as an un-editable PDF, you have the confidence to diplomatically sidebar with your business client to request the Word version and to make reasonable and fair changes to it.

“Credibility in a negotiation generally flows away from the ridiculous, and towards the reasonable.”

Or if their negotiators tend to fly off the handle or speak disrespectfully to you, you have the patience to remain the most reasonable voice, the calmest, the most rational.

Credibility in a negotiation generally flows away from the ridiculous, and towards the reasonable. I have been in any number of negotiations where members of the client’s team started working around their own rude or hostile negotiator and advocated for my firm's positions because they could see that I was trustworthy and working hard to find a reasonable resolution.

Which brings me to the final point about the self-respect mindset. When you believe that you’re worth all of this trouble, then you will be motivated to do the necessary work. You’ll gather the most persuasive and hard-to-find information, you will generate trust in the room, and you will find those creative contractual solutions that everyone can be happy with.

Ultimately, when the contract is signed, the worst-case-scenario provisions will (hopefully) sit completely unused in storage somewhere. But the feeling of how you collaborated with your internal team and your new client, how you navigated challenging situations, personalities, and risks quickly and effectively, will remain front of mind for everyone in this partnership for a surprisingly long time.