Samenvatting

There is little known on settlement negotiations during civil lawsuits in the Netherlands. Settlement negotiations take place during a (suspension of the) public court hearing. The public hearing takes place in the majority of the civil lawsuits in the Netherlands. The qualitative empirical research I am carrying out, intents to give insight in these settlement negotiations and questions what lawyers actually do during these negotiations. The research intents to contribute to the effectiveness of settlement negotiations in the sense that (i) the number of settlements increases and of compulsory settlements decreases, (ii) the perceived fairness of procedure and outcome in settled cases increases, and (iii) the number of resolved underlying conflicts increases.
I expect to find that most settlement negotiations can be qualified as distributive negotiations (as opposed to integrative negotiations). Furthermore, based on a literature review on biases and heuristics I hypothesized that settlement could be more effective than they actually are. The paper touches on the methodology and on both hypotheses.