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. My 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

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