Firm News
Fillmore Riley congratulates winners of the 2023 Robson Hall Negotiation Competition
Overview
Fillmore Riley LLP is proud to have sponsored the Robson Hall Negotiation Competition for the fourteenth consecutive year.
The Eighteenth Annual Robson Hall Negotiation Competition, held on October 11, 2023, gave third-year students who were the top performers in the Legal Negotiation course the opportunity to compete for the prestigious honour of representing Robson Hall in the Canadian National Negotiation Competition.
"We are thrilled with the continued support Fillmore Riley has shown this competition, " said Professor Yvan Guy Larocque, a Robson Hall faculty member who helped organize the competition. "The generous commitment of Fillmore Riley's lawyers to judge the competition ensures students gain invaluable negotiation experience before they begin practising law."
In teams of two, students representing one party to a dispute met with the team representing the other side, with each team possessing confidential information about the background and their clients' settlement preferences. This year the hypothetical problem centred around a fictional Winnipeg law firm and one of its summer intern law students. The student was an unpaid intern responsible for working on the firm's non-billable projects, such as pro bono, community outreach and internal communications work. As the internship went on, the student felt their workload was beyond the reasonable expectation of an unpaid intern and sought representation in receiving compensation for their summer's worth of work.
The teams had to try and negotiate a settlement to this dispute. All of the negotiations took place while the teams were under the ever-watchful eyes of the Fillmore Riley judges, who scored each team’s negotiation skills.
Fillmore Riley’s lawyers have volunteered their time as judges for the competition since its inception. Fillmore Riley’s Aaron Challis, Rachel Loewen, Andrea Signorelli, Sven Hombach, Annika Friesen, Meghan Payment, Amber Harms, Alexa Smith, Ari Hanson, Alexandra Broggy, David Thiessen and Nick Noonan acted as the judges this year.
"Strong negotiation skills are essential to being a good lawyer ,” said Aaron Challis, a partner of Fillmore Riley and the chair of the Professional Recruitment Committee. “We’re proud to sponsor a competition that gives students the opportunity to refine their negotiation skills before they become practising lawyers."
Fillmore Riley congratulates this year's winning team of Nicolas Nudler and Ryan Hall and the 2nd place team of Jamie Robertson and Rebecca Penner, and wishes them luck in the Canadian National Negotiation Competition to be held March 1–2, 2024 at McGill University.