Pre-Litigation Negotiation

Litigation is expensive, slow, and unpredictable. Most businesses know this in the abstract. What they sometimes don’t realize is how much of that cost is determined before a lawsuit is ever filed, by whether the pre-litigation negotiation was handled strategically or reactively.

Pre-litigation negotiation is the stage between “a dispute exists” and “someone files a complaint.” It’s when the parties are still talking, when positions haven’t fully hardened, when the business relationship might still be worth preserving, and when resolution is almost always cheaper and faster than what comes after. It’s also when leverage is most fluid, and when having experienced legal counsel involved makes the biggest practical difference.

What effective pre-litigation negotiation looks like depends on the dispute. Sometimes it’s a well-constructed demand letter that frames the legal exposure clearly and leaves the other side a sensible path to resolution. Sometimes it’s a structured negotiation with both sides at the table. Sometimes it’s a conversation between counsel that happens before anything is put in writing. The form follows the situation.

What it always requires is preparation: a clear understanding of the legal claims and their strength, a realistic assessment of what the other side is likely to do and why, a defined sense of what resolution actually looks like for the client, and the discipline to pursue it without escalating unnecessarily.

Victoria spent nearly a decade as the General Counsel and Chief Legal Officer of large companies, which means she has been the person on the other side of these negotiations, deciding whether to resolve or fight. That perspective is genuinely useful. She knows what moves the needle and what doesn’t, and she approaches pre-litigation negotiation with the goal of getting clients to a resolution that closes the matter without the cost and disruption of what comes next.