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At the March 2013 International Client Seminar hosted by ALFA International in Palm Springs, California, Tom Singer from the Billings office of Axilon Law Group, PLLC, moderated a panel discussion titled “Protecting Rights or Picking Fights:  What Should Lawyers Really Be Doing for Their Clients?”

Singer conceived and proposed the topic and, once it was selected through ALFA’s competitive process, he prepared the presentation materials, recruited the panelists, and led the discussion.  During the one hour presentation, the panel examined the behavior of lawyers during negotiations by using the “Prisoners’ Dilemma,” a model or game developed by mathematicians in the 1950’s and since applied to fields as diverse as business, economics, and evolutionary biology.

Joining Singer on the panel were Jan Manning, general counsel at The Garland Company, Jurgen Suuck, vice president at TM Claims Service, Stan Siegel, partner at Nilan Johnson Lewis in Minneapolis, and Dr. Ryan Murphy, Chair in Decision Theory and Behavioral Game Theory at the ETH – Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.