Corporate: Elizabeth Dotson

Managing Assistant General Counsel – Office of the General Counsel, AF Group

Kansas City

During a negotiation, Elizabeth Dotson, a trial attorney, tries to find out the interests of the people on the other side, evaluate her party’s priorities and find common ground, she said.

It’s a technique she has learned from doing more than 25 years of negotiation and mediation work — and from parenting.

“For people that really want to win, they have got to feel like they won,” said Dotson, managing associate general counsel at AF Group, who specializes in workers’ compensation defense. “It’s really just giving people what they want when it doesn’t matter to you that you gave it to them.”
Or to put it in terms that might help parents, if you have two desserts and someone demands the chocolate cake, “You say, I tell you what I’m going to do for you. I’m going to get you the chocolate cake,” said Dotson, who served on the board of the Wonderscope Children’s Museum of Kansas City. “Because you didn’t care.”

That tactic proved successful when she represented the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and employer stakeholders in negotiations with labor groups over workers’ compensation legislation. At points during the bargaining process over the maximum amount of benefits injured workers could receive, things sometimes got so heated that a person would say, “We’re never going to get this done.” 

But Dotson would reassure people by getting them to see that “this is just an argument that we’re having, that it is not personal,” she said.

The state approved the bill in 2024. Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly described it as a “win for our workforce, our businesses and organized labor.”

In another dispute, Dotson helped an employer with an injured person who had been cleared by doctors to return to work but didn’t feel ready. Dotson encouraged the boss to meet with the employee.

In this situation and others, Dotson tells people that it’s “reasonable to talk with your employee about what their concerns are about their job and how you expect that to be performed,” she said. “You’re giving them permission to do what I think we naturally want to do, which is solve problems, right? Everybody wants a workplace where you get along and you enjoy your work.”