Paul Barron and Tommy Usdin are standing back to back like a couple of street fighters who have found themselves in a bit of a pinch. Team teaching isnýt easy, especially if youýre cornered by 30 eager law students, arms raised and determined to say their piece. Itýs also, at times, confusing.

"Yes?" says Usdin, pointing to a student in a lower tier of the classroom. "Go ahead," says Barron at the same moment but to a student on the other side of the class. Both students begin talking and neither are inclined to stop until Barron steps in.

"OK, OK, hold on. . . . First you, then you and then weýll get to the others."

Ah, the art of the deal. In this case, dealing out classroom harmony. Barron, professor of law and professional mediator, is an expert at it. So is Usdin (L ý85), an adjunct law instructor and attorney-mediator with the New Orleans firm of Gelpi, Sullivan. So are the four other instructors involved in a course at Tulane Law School that is developing new ways to teach the art and craft of negotiating.

I have believed for a long time that law students were not getting sufficient training in a skill that lawyers use every single dayýnegotiating," says Barron, who put together the team-teaching approach for the spring semester as a kind of stepping stone toward upgrading the schoolýs ability to meet the demands of students wanting formal training in negotiation.

Of the six instructors involved in the course, threeýattorneys Charlie Thensted (L ý77), Bill Pitts (L ý69) and Usdinýare veterans at teaching the subject at Tulane. The new kids on the block are Federal District Judge Sarah Vance (L ý78), attorney David Patron and Barron. "Sarah, David and I are the assistants," admits Barron. "Next year we will each take our own sections."

When that happens, enrollment in the course will go from 86 to 150. It is a move calculated to keep Tulane ahead of a curve that is arching over the legal landscape.

"Twenty years ago, people werenýt thinking about the fact that you could analyze negotiation style or approaches and make a conscious choice in how you go about a negotiation," says Barron. "It was an ability that everyone thought they could do and do well."

It was also an ability that was not yet fully recognized as a means to avoid the often brutal emotional and economic costs of litigation. "I think people have become less and less tolerant of the extremes of litigation," says Charlie Thensted, who introduced negotiation to the Tulane curriculum back in 1983 with a course entitled Negotiation and Dispute Resolution.

Having taken a sabbatical leave from his law practice in 1982 to pursue an LLM at Harvard, Thensted became involved in the Harvard Negotiation Project and returned to New Orleans "hot to trot on negotiation." When he was invited by Tulane to open up a section on the subject, he seized the chance not only to offer students a formal training he himself did not receive but also, to some extent, throw a body block at the system he felt had begun to spin out of control.

"In those days you read a lot about the dissatisfaction in being a lawyer and that law students were looking for other professions to get into," says Thensted. "This was a reaction to the kind of lifestyle you had to have as a lawyer. It was a hostile atmosphere all the time and you started saying to yourself, ýwhy do I do this.ý "

Thensted used to tell his students that law was the only occupation in which its practitioners believe they have a right to belittle each other. "Whereas," he says, "if you went into a gas station and asked, ýHow much is the gas?,ý and the attendant replied, ýCanýt you read the sign, you moron!?ý you would never deal with him again."

Fifteen years later, Thensted sees his profession beginning to pull itself out of the battle trenches. With state and federal jurisdictions often demanding some form of mediation before a case goes to trial, lawyers often need a broader palette of negotiation skills to represent their clients.

"I make sure all my cases have been through mediation," says Vance, who has sat on the bench since 1994. "They have to go through a magistrate and if the magistrate hasnýt settled it, I will get involved. If one of the parties mistakenly believes that he or she has a lock on the case, I say, ýOh, no you donýt.ý"

Vance has returned to Tulane, in part, to address the judicial systemýs need for better negotiators and a more active alternative-dispute-resolution process. Both, she says, would go a long way to help the nationýs courtrooms, which are heavily burdened with civil litigation.

"The system would crumble if we tried every case before us," she says, noting that very few cases that come before her involve a precedential issue of law or are of novel public concern. Finally, she says, "Somebodyýs going to lose," in litigation. "People think it is cathartic. It is not."

Vance, who is the only member of the judiciary among the negotiation instructors, team-teaches with Thensted during a three-hour course that meets on Wednesday nights. "I donýt even know if the students realize what a benefit it is to have Sarah as one of the instructors," says Thensted. "They really are given insight in negotiation from her point of view."

Unlike the students she is teaching, Vance had little to no training in negotiation when she left law school in 1978. "I learned by having to do it and often doing it wrong," she says. "I was not prepared for the amount of posturing."

So, come 6 p.m. each Wednesday, the 80-something students in attendance gather in Room 110 of Weinmann Hall to hear a 40-minute lecture by one of the six instructors and then break down into three groups and turned loose to. . .posture, bargain, explain, rationalize, cajole and otherwise cultivate their negotiating skills.

Each group is team-taught by two instructors who give the students general directions regarding a problem or scenario. Then, as the students are paired off with an opposing "attorney," each receives confidential information pertaining to the needs of his or her client. Scenarios are studded with ethical conflicts, attorney-client conflicts, ambiguous legal issues and other problems that mirror what the students may encounter after they leave Tulane. Students then negotiate for approximately 45 minutes. In the final segment of the class, the instructors help the students examine and analyze their negotiations.

As Barron sees it, the course rounds out the skills training offered at Tulane. "We teach the skill of thinking and legal analysis in every class," he says. "We teach writing through legal research, writing courses and upper-level courses. The third skill every lawyer uses is that of negotiating."

The course works hand-in-glove with two law-oriented coursesýalternative dispute resolution (ADR), which will be taught next fall by Dean Ed Sherman, and arbitration, taught by law professor Tom Carbonneauýand a mediation skills course taught by law professor Joel Friedman and assistant dean Julie Jackson.

Bill Pitts, who joined Thensted to teach the old Negotiation and Dispute Resolution course in 1984, had a hand in retrofitting that course into the current model when he joined the law faculty as a visiting professor in 1995. "One of my chores as a visitor was to survey what other law schools were doing and make a recommendation to a faculty committee as to how the curriculum might be changed," he says. The following year, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution was pulled apart, creating the separate ADR survey course and a separate course in negotiation skills.

"It has been an issue, particularly among tonier law schools, that skills courses are just not up to par with standard law school curricula," says Pitts, whose private practice these days is engaged exclusively in mediation and other alternative dispute resolution mechanisms. Pitts sees it in practical terms: the legal world is moving toward ADR and ADR is best facilitated by skilled practitioners. He uses a metaphor from another profession: "There has been a growing recognition in recent years that the concentration in law schools on litigation is like medical schools only teaching surgery as the sole solution to medical problems. Other skills are necessary."

David Patron, a partner at Massengale DeBruhl, LLC, who team-teaches with Pitts, says the negotiation course is following in the footsteps of trial advocacy. "It is a nuts-and-bolts course. As an attorney you are constantly negotiating. When you figure that 95 percent of the civil cases settle, well, those settlements are the result of negotiation. This is a critical area for students."