Dawn Young and Stephen Pfeiffer, a team representing Regent University Law School, Virginia Beach, Va., were deemed top negotiators in the American Bar Association Law Student Division annual Negotiation Competition on February 11 at the ABA Midyear Meeting.

An opportunity for law students to practice and improve their negotiating skills, the Negotiation Competition was established by the Law Student Division in 1985. Young and Pfeiffer were one of 220 teams from 112 U.S. and Canadian law schools to make it to the final round on February 10 and were one of four teams to make it to the championship round. As the highest-ranking team, Young and Pfeiffer will be invited to represent the United States at the International Negotiation Competition to be held, July 2-5, 2007, in Singapore.

“We had a high caliber of competition with the other teams, said Pfeiffer. “It’s absolutely the best competition in the ADR [alternate dispute resolution], and it’s a tremendous honor to earn the title of top negotiator.

The competition involves teams of two students squaring off against each other to negotiate terms of a deal as outlined in the competition problem. Both teams have access to general information about the situation, as well as their client’s confidential details.  All of the simulations deal with the same general topic, but the negotiation situation varies with each round and level of the competition.

This year, natural resources law was the topic of the contest. During the first round on Saturday morning, competitors negotiated a dispute between a group of lakefront homeowners and a city government over the owners’ rights to control the beach areas of their properties. The second round on Saturday afternoon had the negotiators discussing a memorandum of understanding to develop the city’s Waterfront Vision Plan which called for the development of a new park and nature education center on Industrial Bend, a 200-acre section of the waterfront near downtown.

On Sunday, the top four teams negotiated agreements between the same parties involved in round two except this time a discovery of severe PCB contamination was found in Industrial Bend that threatened to delay the development timeline due to cleanup costs.