Lying and Lawyering: Half-Truths in Negotiations
I’m great at lying—for better or worse. I’ve been performing magic my entire life, which is to say, I’ve been deceiving people my entire life.
(I bent the fork with my mind, by the way.)
I regularly look people right in the eye and say, “Now, I have no idea what your card is,” when I know that their card is the three of clubs…because every card in the deck is the three of clubs.
I keep my deception separate from my law school career, but last week in Negotiations, I was encouraged to merge the two.
We had a simulation in which I was playing the role of a landowner who wanted to buy an easement running through a neighbor’s property. I was planning to develop the land and build 8 condos on it….but if the owner of the neighboring land found that much out, they’d likely refuse to sell me the easement or charge me an arm and a leg for it; they didn’t want a lot of traffic running through their land.
The point of the assignment was to get the easement for as little as possible…only I wasn’t allowed to directly lie about my plans to develop the land. (The Model Rules of Profession Conduct prevent that.) I was encouraged to provide half-answers and dodge questions and that sort of thing.
Long story short: I struck the best deal in the class. By far. Here are some bits of conversation from my deal.
Land Owner: What are you going to use the land for?
Lawyer Boy: If we strike a deal today, I can promise to use it for only residential purposes.
LO: How much traffic will there be on my road.
LB: Is traffic a big concern for you?
LO: Sure is.
LB: Me too. My last house was on a main road and there’d be cars going by at all hours…
During the post-negotiations wrap up, the professor, who had been monitoring all the negotiations, said, “Mr. Lax, you were doing everything you could to avoid the issue at hand, and it seems as though you succeeded in doing so.”
I hope my time spent doing magic will help me in my legal career…but I also wonder whether it might get me into trouble one day…
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Posted in Law School Life, Classroom Observations | 
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April 7th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Jamy Ian Swiss, a professional magician and the subject of a recent New Yorker article about contemporary magic, refers to himself as an ‘honest liar’. He says the magician tells you he’s going to trick you, and then does.
In Counselor Lax’s case, I do think that transplanting that talent into law will get him into trouble…
Whereas magicians are respected for lying, lawyers are despised for it.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
yeah, whatever you do, don’t tell the jury you’re going to lie to them…
April 9th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Completely not relevant, but the first time I saw this picture I didn’t realize what you were holding was a fork. The picture was a lot smaller and from what I could make out I thought you were holding a little tiny magic wand and pretending to do a trick with a wand the size of a toothpick.