Most recently, Lax and Sebenius have focused on the role of social media in shaping negotiations, particularly those in the public eye.

In 2021, they co-authored a paper with Ben Cook and Paul Levy presenting a framework for understanding what they call "The Unexplored Power of Social Media in Negotiation,"[3] which they later expanded on in a Harvard Business Review article that suggested a "Playbook for Negotiators in the Social Media Era.

While attending Summit High School, he began working as a programmer for the statistics department at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ and was a participant in a National Science Foundation Summer Program on Quantitative Social Science at Michigan State University.

His senior thesis under advisor John Tukey at Princeton is considered a fundamental work on robust estimation of scale.

Lax took a leave of absence from his teaching position at Harvard Business School to join a small investment bank that focused on restructuring in highly unionized industries and then joined First City Capital Corporation, the New York merchant banking arm of a wealthy Canadian family, where he analyzed and negotiated various private equity investments, joint venture entries and exits, financings, and structuring of partnership agreements.

Upon leaving First City Capital and an affiliate, Lax began advising companies and governments in complex or challenging negotiations.

Its corporate clients include American Express, Bupa, Diageo, Grupo Pao Azucar, Infineon, Intel, KPMG, Lufthansa, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Raytheon, Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Chartered Bank, Telstra, TransAlta, and Verizon Wireless.

The firm has worked on behalf of governments including Mexico, Indonesia, Malaysia and the United States and for a number of state-owned entities.

If on the other hand, she knew that the other party was going to take a value-creating approach, she could maximize her outcomes by claiming value and exploiting the information the counterpart revealed.

His suggestion was that revenue should flow into a separate escrow account touched by neither players nor owners until the dispute was resolved.

He led a project funded by the Madison Initiative to help Republicans and Democrats negotiate deals across party lines in the national security area.

Eric T. Lax is co-founder of Pando Pooling and also of Trext and Riva HQ, and lives in San Francisco.