Paramount and California AG Described by Negotiation Experts as 'Two Separate Parties Who Have Been Talking to Each Other,' Sources Confirm Talks Involved Words Exchanged in Sequential Order
LOS ANGELES — Paramount Pictures and the California Attorney General's office are reportedly nearing a settlement, according to sources familiar with the negotiations, prompting a 72-hour emergency symposium in which twelve of the nation's leading settlement experts gathered to explain, in careful and technically accurate detail, what a settlement is and what it would mean for it to be near.
"What we're looking at here," said Dr. Constance Ferble, chair of the Dispute Resolution Adjacency Studies program at the University of Southern Nevada, "is a situation in which two parties who previously disagreed are now talking about disagreeing less. This is called 'advanced talks,' and it is more advanced than talks we would classify as 'preliminary' or 'not yet occurring.'" She paused to let the room absorb this. No one spoke. She continued anyway.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported that the talks were advanced, stopped short of confirming whether the talks had been advanced from the beginning or had become advanced over time. A panel of media literacy consultants convened Thursday to determine which of these was true, ultimately releasing a 200-page white paper concluding that "advancement implies a prior, less advanced state, and that prior state would have had to exist before the advanced state for the advanced state to be considered an advancement."
The California Attorney General's office declined to comment, which legal communication scholars noted was itself a form of communication, specifically the kind that involves not saying anything.
Paramount, meanwhile, issued a statement saying the company does not comment on ongoing legal matters, which observers noted was a comment about ongoing legal matters.
"A settlement, if reached, will represent the resolution of a dispute that was previously unresolved," explained Terrence Gopp, a senior fellow at the Institute for Outcomes That Follow Prior Conditions. "At that point, the case will be considered settled, which is the technical term for a case that has been settled. We want to be very clear about that distinction going into this."
Gopp added that should no settlement be reached, the talks would be reclassified as "unsuccessful," a designation his office confirmed would only be applied after the talks had concluded without success and not before, "for sequencing reasons."
As of press time, both sides remain in advanced talks, which experts say is where parties in advanced talks typically are.