Philip L. "Phil" Marcus's (philmarcus) Blog

  Everyone who puts creative work on a website lives in fear that someone else will take it and use it.  Or should live in fear, because it is so common.  Some people think photos, text, stories, poems, drawings and so forth put on a website are free for the using on another site.  Some are just ...

Deciding how much to offer the seller.  Deciding whether to accept an offer, or whether to have open houses and, if so, how many.  There are these and many others in the course of buying or selling a property.  An agent must help their client to resolve all these.  And without a sale, the agent m...

Like everyone, I see the recent deal with the North Koreans as a real opportunity to increase world stability and reduce the chance of nuclear war. As an attorney and negotiation trainer, I see a learning opportunity for everyone who makes deals. The 5+ decades since the nominal end of the Korean...

    Recently the broker for a seller of commercial property in the Washington, D.C. area advised his client to take an offer less than the highest, and he took the advice.  Why?       Very simple.  That offer provided more cash than the highest offer, thus requiring less borrowing, and making su...

Years ago a daily newspaper serving lawyers, real estate people, bankers, etc., sold pads of contracts for sale of residential property.  However, there were two versions, a “Seller’s” contract and a “Buyer’s” contract.  One favored the seller and the other the buyer.  Either could be presented t...

  I want a million dollars for my building and you think it’s worth half that.  Why don’t we just split the difference?  One answer is that although it seems on the surface an efficient solution, it is really expedience, not reason. To see that, let’s look at a famous dispute recorded in history ...

                Although they are all intellectual property, they are very different.  They cover very different things, you acquire them in different way, keep them for different lengths of time and in different ways, and have different remedies if they are stolen or otherwise misused.  The dif...

In late Feb. ’07 the Edmonton Oilers ice hockey team dealt away one of their top players, Ryan Smyth, to the NY Islanders.  Many were surprised, because Smyth is a native Canadian, (he grew up near Edmonton in Banff) and Canadian teams don’t often trade away Canadian players—it ticks off the loc...

Someone mentioned to me that I tend to use a lot of scenarios from international relations for starting points for my Negotiation 101 lessons. It's true.I do that because they are situations most discerning people know about, even if they have no idea what they would do if they were personally in...

The recent Iraq Study Group report and the various reactions to it shine a light on a frequent problem in all kinds of negotiation and dispute resolution.   The Study Group recommended that the US and Israel, with slightly different interests, both begin talks with Iran and Syria.  The idea for ...