The Reputational Advantages of Demonstrating Trustworthiness : Using the Reputation Index with Law Students

Lawyers should care about their reputations. But exactly what sort of reputation should lawyers seek to establish and maintain in the largely nontransparent context of legal negotiations? And even if a lawyer has developed a reputation as a negotiator, how will he/she know what it is and how it came to be? This article describes a Reputation Index that can be used in legal negotiation courses. The tool can be especially helpful in courses that focus on developing law students’ skills in distributive (or value-claiming) negotiation. Although legal negotiation certainly offers frequent opportunities for the creation of integrative (or value-creating) joint and individual gains, the process will almost inevitably involve distribution. The pie, once baked, must be cut. Basing part of students' grades on their negotiation outcomes, however, has the potential to encourage the students to engage in “sharp practice” — an extreme form of hard bargaining that tests ethical boundaries — in order to achieve the best short-term distributive outcomes. Of course, neither a quantitative focus nor sharp practice is synonymous with a distributive approach to negotiation. Nonetheless, professors can use students' scores on the Reputation Index to counterbalance the temptations posed by the focus on, and ranking of, students' objective results. Students' Reputation Index scores are based on fellow students’ nominations, accompanied by explanatory comments. This article describes the Reputation Index and how the author uses it. It also explores the empirical support for the validity of the Reputation Index as a tool for simulating the development and assessment of lawyers’ reputations in the “real world.” To that end, the article considers research regarding the bases for lawyers’ perceptions of effectiveness in legal negotiation, the sometimes counterintuitive distinction between negotiation “approach” and negotiation “style,” and the relationships among perceptions of a cooperative negotiation style, procedural justice, perceptions of trustworthiness, and reputation