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Skills for Lawyers and Non-lawyers​

 

STAND UP: Skills for Making and Delivering on Great Deals

The PeopleGears℠ practice helps people build and apply deal skills, focusing on five pre-deal and two full-lifecycle deal competencies.

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Pre-Dea Skills:

1. Deal Strategy

2. Lawyer-Client Teamwork

3. Negotiation Analysis 

4. Agreement Negotiation

5. Agreement Documentation

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Full-Lifecycle Skills:

1. Understanding the Agreement

2. Managing Power Differentials

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Fred Williams makes his PeopleGears℠ coaching service available to lawyers, as well as other people who need or may need lawyers to help them with contracts or legal disputes.

 

Serving Lawyers

Law school can be an amazing experience, if only we might fit it all in. Law is the backbone of society; the legal system provides its gears; lawyers are gear masters, for better and for worse. With PeopleGears℠ coaching and consulting, Fred aspires to serve lawyers, both in law firms and in-house legal departments, in order to provide them with resources to enable them to do their best through effective negotiation, contract drafting and review and lawyer-client teaming.

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The unpleasant fact about the legal profession is that many lawyers are not so good at negotiation, contract drafting and review and lawyer-client teaming, skills that go the heart of transactional work but are also essential to litigation (with settlement being the likely albeit protracted much of the time). Added to that little-known reality is the fact that most lawyers are not exactly world-class (though perhaps way-better than many of their clients) when it comes to certain related skills -- skills they need to have do but for which they have received little, if any, formal training: project management, strategy and problem solving. ​

 

Serving Non-lawyers

Doing things that lawyers are trained to do (like negotiating contracts or resolving disputes), without the assistance of counsel, can be a daunting, costly experience for people who are not trained in such things. Done poorly, hiring and using lawyers to assist with such endeavors can be even more daunting and more costly.

 

PeopleGears℠ coaching and consulting solutions for non-lawyers are designed not only to empower people in contract negotiation (whether individually or on behalf of their organizations) but also to put them in command, whether or not they bring lawyers onto their team. When disputes deteriorate to the point of litigation, an essential purpose of these solutions is to make it less daunting and costly for people to cost-effectively get the results they want through effective lawyer-client teaming and negotiation.

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A Seasoned Transactional Lawyer

Fred Williams is a seasoned negotiator and problem solver. He is the founder of the DealPoint Law Firm PLLC.

 

Over the course of thirty years, prior to founding his law firm, Fred was

• a senior attorney with

  • global leader financial services leader JPMorgan Chase

  • FIS, a global provider of information processing and outsourced services

• general counsel to a startup pioneer in landing-page optimization, now the MECLABS Institute

• technology licensing counsel at electronics and electrical engineering giant Siemens Corporation.

 

At NYC-based JPMorgan Chase, Fred

• was both an attorney and a procurement specialist, handling technology deals of all sizes (with deals occasionally exceeding $100 million in contract value)

• became head of contracts for its Global Procurement organization, in which capacity he introduced its first enterprise-wide database of procurement contracts, as well as a number of organizational and technical innovations.

 

At Jacksonville-based FIS, Fred divided most of his time between

• negotiating sales agreements with banks, other financial institutions and marketing partners 

• negotiating procurement agreements with technology providers and other vendors

• resolving contract disputes

• managing templates and guidelines for sales and procurement agreements. 

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Before joining the corporate world, Fred was a transactional attorney with Baltimore-based Piper & Marbury (now global leader DLA Piper) doing mostly technology and commercial deals and corporate work, including mergers and acquisitions.