When I was a volunteer with the VSO programme in Indonesia in 1970, negotiation was part of everyday life. You never paid the asking price but always negotiated until a compromise was reached with the seller of goods or services. After getting my bus from the centre of Jakarta, there was still a mile walk down to the compound where I lived or you could take a Becak (a rickshaw) from the bus stop; but what price should you pay the Becak driver? I knew that the locals paid 10 Rupiah max for the journey but I was "orang putih" (white) and by definition, a "rich punter". It would have a slight on the driver to have me pay the same as the locals notwithstanding that my volunteer pay was less than the Indonesian national average rate. So at the beginning I paid 20 Rupiah after they suggested 50 as a starting price and eventually, when they got to know me, it went down to 15 and this seemed to satisfy everyone.

Negotiation is a core skill of a lawyer and when we set out a training schedule for our Trainee Solicitors we make sure they gain negotiation skills during their training contract. I have just carried out the appraisals of our Trainees moving between departments as they gain varied experience to ensure they are rounded lawyers upon qualification. Negotiation in one form or another comes into many areas of law. Whether it be the issue of how much contact a party will have with children following relationship breakdown or the amount of a settlement following a medical accident, good negotiation skills are essential.

So what is negotiation all about? The first thing is that you need to understand the nature of the problem you are trying to solve. In my Indonesian bargaining example, one might have thought that what I was trying to achieve was the lowest price for the service I wanted to purchase. In fact the problem, even for this simplest of transactions, was more complicated than that. First there was the problem of my identity and my perceived wealth. Second was the fact that I was going to use the service on an ongoing basis and therefore I needed to come to a solution where I could develop a relationship with the service provider over a long period. Third there was the issue of reputation. As a visitor and outsider and someone who was in Indonesia to provide a service as a volunteer, did I want to earn a reputation as a nasty cut throat foreigner? There was much more than a price for a service at stake.

Negotiation usually has many facets. Knowing your own objectives whilst understanding who you are dealing with and where they are coming from is vital. If you can find a solution which you can live with and will allow the other parties to move on too (hopefully happy) the negotiation has achieved its ideal outcome. This is entirely different from a litigation solution where at the end of the day you take a risk about what view a third party (often a judge) will take of the situation. Usually that leads to a winner and a loser and that is not a recipe for a happy relationship in the longer term. Sometimes this may not matter, but often a victory can have disastrous consequences for the victor as well as the vanquished.

On the subject of negotiations, this brings me to the most topical negotiations of our time; Britain leaving the EU. Yes the British government has a very difficult job on its hands and this is understood in Brussels too. But is does appear that serious negotiation errors have been made. First, too many things were ruled out before the negotiations commenced. ‘We will leave the customs union and the single market. We will not have any jurisdiction from the European Court. We will maintain open borders even in the island of Ireland.’ These red lines have now come back to cause intense problems and it’s hard to see how there is a way out of the impasse particularly when our government negotiators have a myriad of voices urging divergent solutions. Who said Brexit negotiations would be easy? It was certainly not the voices arguing for "Remain".