Most negotiation training focused on the other side of the table. The part nobody talked about was what happened on your side, where multiple stakeholders had competing priorities, unclear authority, and different ideas of what success looked like. That gap was where credible deals quietly came apart, even when the lawyer thought everything was on track.
Laura Frederick hosted this session with Naz Scott, Chief Legal Officer at HireVue, and Brad Jacob, General Counsel of Prevalent Energy. Naz brought a software vendor lens shaped by negotiating with enterprise customers, AI councils, and procurement teams that often did not know their own process. Brad brought $60 billion of commercial negotiation experience across more than 30 countries from his time at Shell and Bechtel, plus the perspective of someone who had walked into rooms where the wrong stakeholder had the pen.
They covered how to identify who actually had authority on a deal, how to read a business team's risk tolerance for a specific transaction, how to communicate legal risk in ways non-lawyers absorbed, how to mediate when internal stakeholders disagreed, and how to use escalation paths to break stalls without damaging relationships.
Here are our top ten takeaways from the speakers' comments during the webinar:
Map authority before the first negotiation session, not during it. The worst thing you can do is sit across from a counterparty, hit a real issue, and admit you have no authority to discuss it. Brad put this at the top of the pyramid for a reason. Authority confusion turned a negotiation into a series of "I'll get back to you" responses that bled credibility from the deal team. Build the map first, even when it feels obvious.
Treat the business stakeholder as a source, not the source. The person who brought you the deal probably did not know their own organization's full process. Use them to start the map, but assume their procurement counterpart, InfoSec lead, or department head has information they do not. Naz's pattern of asking the business stakeholder to name people and then coaching them on what to ask their own counterparts is a fast way to surface authority you would otherwise miss until the end.
Calibrate risk tolerance to the specific deal, not the company default. Your general playbook covers most deals. The ones that hurt you are the ones where leverage, deal stage, or strategic value shifted what the company was actually willing to accept on this particular transaction. Brad's pre-negotiation term sheet aligns upper management on movement room for each clause before you walk in. That is the discipline that prevents bringing the deal back in pieces for resigning.
When you lack leverage, articulate the risk instead of trying to mitigate it. Sometimes the goal is not to fix the risk. It is to make sure the business knows what they are accepting. Naz drew the line between mitigation and articulation, and it is worth keeping in mind. A lawyer who clearly explains a risk the company has decided to accept did their job. A lawyer who tries to fight an unwinnable battle on a clickthrough wastes everyone's time and burns credibility.
Use analogies, not legal language, to explain risk to non-lawyers. Locked doors and bricks through windows did more work for Naz than a paragraph about data security obligations. The point is to translate, not to simplify in a way that loses the real risk. Pairing the analogy with the curiosity move (what would this do to your business if it happened) gets you both the impact and the likelihood you need to give useful advice.
Document everything during the negotiation, not after. Brad sent daily summaries on big deals, with open issues, closed issues, and signals about where help might be needed later. He never had it taken as defensiveness. Naz used short risk memos for take-it-or-leave-it deals where there was no negotiation, just risk acceptance. Both habits made it impossible for anyone to later claim they did not understand what they had agreed to. Quiet, steady documentation prevents the bad surprise at signing.
Run the reasonable-person gut check before escalating yourself. Laura's standard, learned from a general counsel, is worth borrowing. If any reasonable person at that authority level could make the decision, leave it. If no reasonable person on earth would agree to this knowing what they know, that is the signal to talk to your manager. It keeps you from escalating too often, which dilutes the signal, while making sure you escalate when it really matters.
Use verbal channels for internal disagreement, written channels for the paper trail. Email turned a disagreement into a record that hardened positions, while a short pre-read followed by a real conversation moved people. Brad's approach was the standard. Send the issue and your recommendation in writing, then talk it through. The live conversation was where the resolution happened, and the written pre-read was what made the conversation productive.
Build a back-channel relationship with your counterpart on big deals. Brad's "if I can bundle X and Y, can you give me A and B" move is the kind of hypothetical that only works if you have built enough trust with the other lawyer to talk informally. Encourage your team to build similar relationships at their level. That back channel is often what gets a deal moving when the formal track stalls.
Remember the counterparty sees one company. Internally we think in departments, like legal, InfoSec, compliance, and the business. The customer or vendor does not see that structure. They see one unified organization. Internal alignment is not just an efficiency exercise, it is how you avoid sending mixed signals that get exploited or that erode trust. The outward message has to be unified even when the internal work is messy.
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