By: Ashley Romero, Associate, Mountain View
Imagine the average Bay Area middle school student. Now picture that student trained in the art of negotiation. If you just saw in your mind’s eye the image of a force to be reckoned with, then you have imagined any one of eighteen students now walking the halls of McKinley Institute of Technology (MIT), a Redwood City, California middle school.
What is Citizen Schools?
Just last week, Fenwick & West LLP “graduated” another class of young negotiators from our Citizen Schools negotiation program. Citizen Schools is a local after-school program providing middle school students in low-income communities with expanded learning days, rich with opportunities to gain critical life and career skills. Our group of eighteen sixth- through eighth-grader students trekked every Wednesday this spring from MIT in Redwood City to our Mountain View office to learn everything from bargaining styles, goal-setting and BATNAs (best alternative(s) to a negotiated agreement) to active listening, empathy and information gathering. With the help of MIT teacher Margaret Ramey, a team of transaction associates from our Corporate and Intellectual Property practice groups and volunteer in-house attorneys from local technology companies taught lessons from G. Richard Shell’s Bargaining for Advantage book. Our sessions with the MIT students involved mock negotiations and hands-on guidance from the attorney teachers as the MIT students prepared their final negotiation projects to present to their families.
Why Citizen Schools?
In late January, a colleague of mine asked if I had any interest in teaching children negotiation skills one hour a week at our office, and my response was, “YES. 1000% interest.” It had been some time since my last pro bono project—representing a San Francisco teen in his petition to appoint a family member as his guardian—and, from the time I applied to law school, I intended that at least some portion of my legal career would involve working with children. This teaching project sounded like a great way to weave pro bono into my practice this year.
When my colleague told me that the topic for the course was negotiation skills, I was ecstatic. I learned more about myself from my negotiation course in law school than I learned in nearly any other course in my long academic career. I couldn’t fathom what might have happened to me if, at age twelve or thirteen, I had learned my default bargaining style or realized how essential preparation is to achieving your goals in a persuasive conversation. Negotiation courses in law school have informed how I approach so many of my professional and, more importantly, personal conversations.
On the first day of class, however, I realized the real impact of our Citizen Schools negotiation class. It wasn’t watching the light go off for our students when we explained how they could use empathy and active listening to have more productive, successful discussions and negotiations with their parents. Nor was it enjoying the parallels of seeing a strong sixth grade student really test and stretch her skills in a negotiation against a very eloquent eighth grade student, as every attorney has done when negotiating with a more senior or more experienced attorney.
The importance of the Citizen Schools negotiation class is exposure. When the MIT students arrived on the first day for our class, I realized that many, if not most of them, had never been inside a professional office before, may never have met an attorney before, or even imagined that an attorney could be someone other than a suited man in a wood-paneled courtroom who looked like Perry Mason. I grew up in a part of the Bay Area where only about one-third of my high school class went on to a four-year university. The first attorney I met was the boutique law firm partner I worked for straight out of college, and the first time I met attorneys I could identify with was when I interviewed to be a law school summer associate in a law firm. Where might I be if I had met a young attorney, who didn’t fit my idea of what being a lawyer meant, when I was in middle school?
I know that all of our volunteer attorney teachers left our classes each week rejuvenated and reflective. And, we hope our MIT students left the course with both improved persuasive communication skills and confirmation that nearby are people just like our students, doing things our students hadn’t imagined were possible or didn’t realize existed before the Citizen Schools course.
Fenwick's team of volunteer attorney teachers included Vishal Dave, Adam Derry, Darren Hutchins, Evan Johnson, Cynthia Kaneshiro, Kelli Newman, Ashley Romero, and Jonathan Smith.
Ashley Romero, a graduate of Stanford Law School, is an associate in the Coporate practice group at Fenwick & West LLP. She focuses her practice on a broad variety of corporate matters to support clients in the high technology and life sciences industries. While in law school, Ashley served as Assistant Editor, Senior Editor, and Articles Editor of the Stanford Law & Policy Review. She also participated in Stanford Law School’s Pro Bono Guardianship Program and was the recipient of The Judge Robert F. Peckham Scholarship.
Follow via RSS
d
Posted by: betty b | 02/27/2015 at 08:20 AM
Nice post to share Underprivileged Kids To Negotiate Inspires Them To Achieve. These Citizen Schools is a local after-school program providing middle school students in low-income communities with expanded learning days, rich with opportunities to gain critical life and career skills.
Posted by: Brandon Steven | 08/27/2018 at 10:16 PM
Great post and I like this post. This information is very useful. Thank you so much for sharing it. I would like to be share with others.
Posted by: Tim Bosque | 05/13/2019 at 02:48 AM