Faculty of Law, University of Maribor organizes Negotiations for Students as a national competition since 2005. The competition is organised by Associate Professor Janja Hojnik Ph.D.

Most of the disputes that involve lawyers do not even find their conclusion in a court but are rather solved in the form of a particular compromise between the parties. For lawyers to achieve the best results for their party, they need to master the art of negotiation. The study of methods, used in negotiations, is a common practice in several foreign universities in USA and Australia and is starting up also in European countries like Great Britain and Ireland. These universities also have competitions that involve negotiations and each year more universities from Europe (mostly France and Denmark) take part in them.

The goal of the competition

Negotiations are not studied as a part of the regular education programmes in Slovenian faculties, so it is essential to provide the students with other possibilities to train their negotiation skills. Having this in mind, the Faculty of Law, University of Maribor annually organizes a competition in negotiations for the students at the beginning of the summer semester.

Hopefully, after participating in the competition, more students will be intrigued by the alternative dispute resolution mechanisms and skills, urgently needed to be a good negotiator. The competition encourages students to study this field of law and enables the establishment of contacts between the students of all three Slovenian faculties of law.

The course of the competition

The teams of two students are given a hypothetical legal problem (publicly known) and given classified instructions from their parties. They need to negotiate with the opposing team and achieve as many benefits for their party as possible in the limited time (30 minutes).

Criteria

Students are judged on how well they are prepared, on their ability to adjust to the situation and the proposals of the other party, the result of the negotiation, their team appearance – cooperation, ethics and attitude toward the opposing counsels.