Method
Strategy decides whether you should be at the table at all. Tactics decide what gets said once you are. Swap the two and you lose the dispute at the moment you are winning the individual exchanges.
The costliest confusion I see in disputes is not a legal one. It is the confusion of strategy with tactics. Tactics are how you play at the table: what you say, what you withhold, when you push. Strategy is whether that table should be sat at — and what is actually being played for.
Most people, experienced business owners included, play excellent tactics in a badly chosen game. They win the exchanges and lose the dispute, because the cost of a dispute is not the figure on the invoice but the exposure the dispute opens up: time, witnesses, precedent, reputation, and the information that discovery brings into the light.
The work I am describing here begins before the law does: what is actually going on, who has time on their side, what each party cannot afford to allow — and only then, what it is played with.
Layer 0 · The operator
Affect does not take away your argument, it takes away your calibration — the ability to pick the right argument at the right moment. Someone who is flooded is not calculating the game, they are running on reflex. Fatigue belongs here too: which is why important things get settled in the morning.
Layer 1 · Game theory
The structure of the game: one-off or repeated, who actually decides and who is only a messenger, what is spoiling for whom over time, when a commitment is stronger than a threat.
Layer 2 · Psychology
The systematic ways real players depart from the model. Anchoring works on professionals too; a concession curve speaks sooner than the person making the concessions.
Layer 3 · Law
The set of permitted and enforceable moves — and the game of the record. Czech law has no settlement privilege: what is said in settlement talks can become evidence. Every sentence has two audiences.
Layer 4 · Rhetoric
Delivery of the move: order, wording, channel, timing and silence. Whoever speaks pays in information — and after your own offer, silence is the cheapest move you have.
Rhetoric without game theory is eloquence in the wrong game. I use the Harvard school — interests against positions, BATNA, ZOPA — as vocabulary where it is precise, not as the operating system: it assumes a counterparty willing to enlarge the pie, and a good many disputes do not have one.
Anatomy of the situation
A client usually arrives with a sentence that sounds practical. “I need to reply.” “I want to know whether to sue.” “I have to talk to them.” That sentence usually carries the pressure, not the problem.
What is decided before the law is
Who has time on their side. What is spoiling for whom — solvency, witnesses, the emotional window, limitation periods, reputational heat. BATNA is a function of time, not a constant.
Who is a player and who is a piece
The decision-maker, the messenger, the coalition in the background, and the silent veto-holder who can say no without ever speaking. A messenger gets your problems, never your solutions — and never a concession.
Which frame the dispute is being run in
Disputes about facts, about values, about law and about procedure have different standards of winning. A debate across two frames is structurally unresolvable; the parties answer each other across a gap.
Where the record is created
Writing manufactures evidence and takes away the other side's impunity. Voice is fast, relational and leaves no trace. The choice of channel is a move, not administration — and whoever writes the minutes writes the history.
The first card
When someone pushes you with a deadline, you ask them four questions and yourself one. The one decides: does my position get worse if I wait? If it does not, it is theatre — respond to the substance, not to the tempo.
The card is a single A4 page to print, taken from the course workbook. I will send it to you by e-mail. Occasionally I will send another card when there is something to say; I do not promise how often, and one click unsubscribes.
The course
Anyone will teach you tricks. We teach why they work — so that they hold at the moment you need them most.
Negotiation as a discipline you can calculate, not as charisma. Two days, sixteen people, your own case.
Day one is strategy: which game you are in, what is spoiling for whom over time, how the ground is prepared, how you speak when you are being recorded. Day two is tactics in the service of strategy: the anchor, silence, the discipline of concessions, pressure and tempo, closing. Day two opens with the sentence that without day one, everything said today is worthless.
Forty per cent teaching, sixty per cent drill. When time runs short, the teaching is what gets cut. No rule is stated before the participants have felt, first-hand, the phenomenon that rule addresses — and every concept comes with a counter-example of when it fails. A rule without an internal reason is a muzzle: it holds right up until there is pressure.
CZK 44,900 excluding VAT per participant. The price includes the workbook, the cards, all exercise materials and the thirty-day follow-up. Recorded exercises are made only with consent, and the recordings are deleted after the debrief.
Sixteen places. I read the applications myself and I do not accept all of them. I will decline an application in particular where your case touches a matter handled by the IUSTORIA law firm, where I hold information about the matter or the counterparty from my legal practice, or where two participants in the same run would be on opposite sides of the same matter. A refusal is not a judgement of you or of your case, and I do not state a reason — the reason may be the very existence of information I am not allowed to discuss. In that case I refund the fee in full.
Simulation materials are not handed out and not published; each edition is used repeatedly. I do not promise you will win your dispute.
No date has been set yet. Anyone on the waiting list hears about the first run before it becomes public and has priority when places are allocated. Joining the list commits you to nothing.
The course is not the provision of legal services. It is an educational programme: it teaches a general method of negotiation and dispute strategy, not the resolution of any particular participant's matter. During the course the instructor does not assess your case, does not recommend a course of action in it and does not represent you. Attending the course does not create a lawyer–client relationship between you and the instructor or the IUSTORIA law firm, and gives rise to no duty of legal assistance. The cases participants bring serve as training material. If you need a legal service in your own matter, it is agreed separately and outside the course. The Czech wording of this notice is the authoritative one.
In-house day
A one-day format for a single team. It is preceded by a two-hour preparation call, an NDA, and three real counterparties the team actually deals with. The content is built on your prices, your customers and your contracts: an inventory of the team's games, timing balances for three live cases, the anchor and silence on your own numbers, the game of the record for your commercial e-mails, and a team simulation.
The output is a team playbook: who is allowed to anchor, what the escalation mandates are, what the company's deadline rule is, who goes to the balcony and how they signal it to the others. The client receives team patterns, never individuals — and that holds even when the client asks otherwise.
From CZK 160,000 excluding VAT per day, preparation included. Plainly: from four people upwards the in-house day costs less than the same number of places on the open course — and you get your own cases and confidentiality with it. The open course has one advantage the in-house day cannot have: the room contains people from other fields, and another field will find your blind spot faster than a colleague will.
The Long Game — a one-day continuation for alumni. Reputation as an asset, precedent, coalitions and multi-party games, and the internal negotiation inside your own firm, which tends to be harder than the one with the other side.
Negotiating in the age of AI — a half-day module. A counterparty prepared by a machine, generated contract drafts and how to read them, verifying synthetic records. The module is demonstrated live, not described.
Both formats open on demand from alumni, not on a calendar.
The course teaches an individual a discipline. The content is a curriculum, the simulations are a teaching instrument, and the output is your own skill.
VELAR Dynamics builds original social simulations for groups. The content is a designed experience and group dynamics, and the output is the team's lived experience — no curriculum, no assessment of individuals.
A strategic consultation is your live situation, now, one to one. You are buying a move, not a muscle. An acute dispute belongs here — the course will not arrive in time.
The question that separates them: do you want your people to learn something — or your team to live through something and see itself doing it?
Representation under mandate is handled by IUSTORIA, attorneys at law. The course and the in-house day are invoiced outside the firm.