The winner of the the 2012 ICC Mediation Competition in Paris was South Texas College of Law. Hurrah.

I was over in Paris for the Preliminary Rounds earlier this week. This is an excellent opportunity for students around the world to work up their negotiating skills in something a bit like a professional context.

Each round features a haggle between two University teams presided over by a professional mediator. The teams have a scenario in common, plus their own confidential briefs explaining what they really want and don’t want from any settlement. The skill lies in articulating their own interests well and finding deft arguments for managing the replies from the other side. My own role was not a Mediator but a Judge, marking the two teams (and the Mediator) according to a number of defined criteria.

In the rounds I saw the students were smart, articulate and effective, not least those teams having to do the whole competition in English where that is not their native tongue.

The main problem was that they all tended to be smart, articulate and effective on the wrong things, often getting bogged down in intriguing points of detail and losing sight of bigger issues at stake.

In particular, when an issue was in dispute (such as liability for a chef plus large cake falling over on a hotel escalator), they seemed to think that by sheer dint of cleverness and sheer attrition they could compel the other side to back down, when in fact the smart thing to do was suggest that it would be huge waste of time and stress to take this footling probem to court and instead cut a speedy deal.

The most simple issue has to be identified up front: do we divorce, or do we maintain a rebooted relationship? If the latter, what can we both bring to it, and how to avoid any stupid disagreements in future?

The competition made me realise that the main point of a mediation is NOT, as mediation theory has it, to ‘find a deal’. That’s the easy bit. The real battle and skill for all parties is to try to get a deal at the favourable (for them) part of the Zone of Possible Agreement (ZOPA, as we in the trade call it). The Mediator needs to give a context for that battle playing itself out.

The competition rules did not make this as clear as it might have been. Plus some teams clearly enjoyed the benefit of serious professional advice, whereas others were for all practical purposes flying blind – a clever academc law prof is not necessarily the best source of tactical and operational advice here, folks!

Anyway, I’ll be proposing to the ICC that next year I’ll be happy to offer some online coaching for teams from non-English native speaker countries to help them grasp some of the core techniques needed to prosper. Watch this space…