Hello, my friend, and welcome to another episode of Negotiate Anything. Thanks for spending

time with us today. It's listeners like you in 181 different countries that have made Negotiate

Anything the most popular negotiation and conflict resolution podcast in the world. I'm your host,

Kwame Christian. I'm a business lawyer, mediator, professor, and the director of the American Negotiation Institute. Before we get started, I have two quick questions for you. Is negotiation a critical part of what you do? Do you need to resolve conflict and persuade at work? If you answered yes to both of those questions, visit our website to learn more about our negotiation workshops.

We've traveled the country working with professionals just like you, and we'd love to have the opportunity to work with you too. Check out the link in the description to learn more.

Veronica, thanks for joining us today. Hey, Kwame, thanks for having me. It's good to be back.

Yes, it's good to have you back, one of our most popular episodes. It's good to have the champion back in town.

No pressure, right? No pressure. Right. So for those of you who don't know Veronica, maybe what you could do is give them a brief overview of what you do?

Sure, sure. So I happen to be an attorney by background, but actually in my professional life, I've spent more time

working as a mediator than an attorney. So I really just more self-identify as a mediator.

I work for our local municipal court in the small claims and mediation department. And I really

focus much of my time in our mediation programs. And for your listeners who might not be

familiar with mediation, basically mediation is an opportunity to resolve something outside of a courtroom in a way that works for everyone. And a mediator is essentially a neutral third party who can basically assist parties in trying to negotiate their own resolution. So the mediator can help parties share

information, share settlement offers, but ultimately the mediator doesn't make a decision. It's up to

parties to make that sort of decision. Fantastic. And so I'm excited to have you on today to talk

about negotiating and resolving conflicts via text message and email, those type of things, because

you have a particularly unique background in it, given your experience in ODR, online dispute

resolution. Can you tell the audience about that too? Yeah, sure. So yeah, it's some pretty exciting

stuff. Just like more and more things in other parts of our lives are going online,

so too is resolving disputes. So we're pretty fortunate that we've got access to the technology

that allows us to try to resolve pending court cases and even situations before they get

to the stage of being a court case outside of a courtroom and not just

...