Episode 24: Linda Alvarez of Discovering Agreement

COUNCIL TOPICS: Restorative Justice and Circles in action; Discovering conflict's gift, and more. Linda is changing the system day by day from within, as an attorney. I am so grateful to her for taking time to share with us insights from the "trenches". Linda Alvarez's work as an attorney and as a business consultant transforms the way contract negotiation, drafting, and enforcement impact business relationships. Linda facilitates a wide range of transactions and relationships, enabling the parties to design worthwhile, sustainable and enjoyable transactions and relationships, conduct their business and legal affairs with integrity, and establish reliable frameworks for addressing conflict productively. The Discovering Agreement approach: Calibrates alignment of the parties' intentions, values, and expectations - allowing them to gauge in advance whether the proposed relationship or transaction will be workable and worthwhile in the long-run; Aligns content and language in legal contracts with the Vision-Mission-Values of the parties - so that contract terms and provisions harness the power of the conventional legal system to support the parties in conducting business and engaging crisis in accordance with their declared Vision/Mission/Values; and Produces contracts that function as guidebooks for keeping the enterprise/transaction/relationship on track and productive - by orienting and re-orienting parties towards collaborative, creative responses to unexpected change or disagreement (as opposed to destructive adversarial posturing). About Linda The first twenty years of Linda Alvarez's professional life were spent pursuing a successful career in the Arts. Trained in theatre, she and her husband produced and managed theatrical and media productions across the United States. In the mid-1990's Linda reentered the academic world earning her law degree, magna cum laude, in 1997. She entered private practice in the large firm environment - including Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (Palo Alto) and Vinson & Elkins (Houston). Beginning with her engagement as a member of the team successfully defending the first mp3 player to come to market[1], Linda has remained active on the frontier where digital technology pushes the boundaries of legal concepts designed for the analog and print-based era. As Senior Counsel for Litigation and Trademarks at Align Technology, Inc., Linda managed major litigations on behalf of the corporation as well as shepherding the company's valuable consumer trademark portfolio. With the successful conclusion of the litigations in 2005, Linda chose to re-focus her career toward transactional work and launched her solo practice. Linda's Website: www.discoveringagreement.com