Two students negotiate national recognition for law school

Friday, March 2, 2001 | 1:31 a.m.

UNLV's fledgling William S. Boyd School of Law caught the attention of the legal profession's academic world last month, when a two-student negotiating team from there placed second in a national competition.

It was the 3-year-old college's first year entering the National Negotiation Competition, which was sponsored by the American Bar Association and took place during the ABA's annual mid-year meeting held in San Diego.

Kara Hendricks and Roger Steggerda tied for second with a team from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The two teams were among 20 finalists who survived regional competitions held at locations around the country in November. More than 100 teams participated in the first round of eliminations.

The team from Western New England College School of Law, in Springfield, Mass., won the event, which involved students negotiating an issue for 50 minutes before a panel of five judges.

Hendricks and Steggerda negotiated an issue related to Microsoft's alleged monopolizing of the computer industry.

Competitors were scored in several categories, with the outcome of the negotiation being one of them. Among the other categories were preparation, ethics and self-evaluation.

The UNLV negotiating team is part of the law school's Society of Advocates, which, on most other law school campuses, is a moot court program in which students prepare hypothetical cases to argue before a panel of judges.

The Society of Advocates is UNLV's umbrella appellate and trial forensic program, said Jeff Stempel, coach of the negotiating team. Among other Society teams are mock trial, client counseling, mediation, alternative dispute resolution advocacy and the traditional appellate advocacy (moot court).

"We wanted to be open to other types of forensic activity (besides just moot court)," said Stempel, who teaches insurance law, professional responsibility, civil procedure and evidence.

The Society of Advocates has 10 members. To become a member, a student must be invited.

Richard Morgan, dean of UNLV's law school, said he is proud of the two students who gave the institution a shot of national prestige.

"Negotiating is the heart of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Short of litigation, it is one of the most important elements in our court system today." he said.

Avoiding court

Morgan is a strong advocate of ADR, noting that civil courts are overloaded with cases that should not be there.

"The court system is not the place to resolve most disputes," he said. "Judges don't have the resources or the time to resolve most of them."

The fact that the school's first student negotiating team won second place in national competition is "consistent with my philosophy" about the importance of ADR, he said.

The school is in the planning stages to create an ADR center.

"I envision that we will have several courses within the law school that teaches skills in negotiating, mediation and arbitration," Morgan said. "And we may have clinical programs (law students helping the general public) that reflect those skills.

"It's an ambitious concept, and a long way from reality, but we're working on it."

Meanwhile many members of the school's faculty volunteer to help students such as Hendricks and Steggerda to hone their legal debate skills.

"Kara and Roger were terrific," Stempel said. "I would like to say it was the coaching that did it, but the truth is some folks have more affinity for negotiating. Some of it is old-fashioned charm and people skills.

"To be an effective negotiator you have to know the substance of your case, the legal remedies, the likely outcomes in court. You have to be a creative thinker and compromiser. You don't leave one party feeling taken advantage of."

To qualify for the finals, Hendricks and Steggerda competed against 28 teams from the Western Division and finished third.

Stempel said he didn't want to overstate the significance of finishing second nationally in the first year of competition. "But when you do that well right out of the block, people do sit up and take notice.

"Some of the leading schools in the country didn't make the finals, and we did. Buzz will get around that we had a very good team, very sharp students. I think it will help put us on the map."

Maturity an asset

Stempel said coaching Hendricks and Steggerda was a little easier than it might have been otherwise because they are older than most students. (Hendricks is 30, and Steggerda declined to give his age, but he has had a long career in teaching and in business.)

Being more mature helps, Stempel said, because it gives you life experiences valuable in negotiating.

He said negotiating is not a matter of the more aggressive person bullying his or her way to a settlement that benefits one side over the other.

"It's about how to think creatively, how to think outside the box. Part of what we're trying to do is to get away from the pure, bi-polar adversarial situation. We try to think of win-win scenarios, which become even more complicated when you have multiple parties involved.

"This competition places a strong premium on being cooperative."

Hendricks, a native of Utah who moved to Las Vegas five years ago, said one of the most exciting things about placing so high in the competition was the attitude of the judges.

"They came up to congratulate us and told how it was really going to help get the school's name out," she said.

Hendricks, who has a degree in communications and was working in retail sales when she decided to go to law school, said a lot of hard work went into preparing for the event.

"There was lots of practice, a lot of pulling the hair out," she said. "Roger and I, we learned our facts very well and we tried to guess what the other side would do. (During practice) we argued back and forth to flesh out (our positions).

"The best thing was that we had a lot of faculty support."

Hendricks intends to become a trial lawyer. She says she believes what she learned on the negotiating team will be a great help when she begins to practice law.

Steggerda has held a variety of sales positions since moving to Las Vegas in 1990. He worked in Iowa for several years, evaluating that state's criminal justice programs. Before that, he taught at Michigan State University.

"I always wanted to go to law school, but it was never feasible until Nevada decided to have one here," he said.

Steggerda said he believes placing high in the competition was significant for the new school.

"A lot of schools have been (competing) for years and have made an art out of (negotiating) and they didn't win anything. We went in blind and did fairly well," said Steggerda, who, like Hendricks, was among the first students accepted into the UNLV law school in the fall of 1998.

He said competition was keen among the schools, but he and Hendricks worked better together than most of the other teams.

"The other teams seem to have one member who was more dominating than the other, but Kara and I went in well prepared and, during the session, we relied on each other. She was a terrific partner."

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