RSVP to mvolpe@jjay.cuny.edu for Zoom link
CUNY Dispute Resolution Center at John Jay College
and
Association for Conflict Resolution of Greater NY
After
mediating, teaching and writing about mediation for more than 40 years,
highly-regarded dispute resolver Gary Friedman decided to run for
political office in his little California village. In this interactive
talk, he will share the many lessons he learned through his own failure.
GARY J. FRIEDMAN has
been practicing law as a mediator with Mediation Law Offices in Mill
Valley, Calif, since 1976, integrating principles of mediation into
the practice of law and the resolution of legal disputes. He has been
teaching mediation since 1980 through The Center
for Understanding in Conflict (formerly The Center for Mediation in
Law), the non-profit organization he co-founded. Prior to his work as a
mediator, he practiced law as a trial lawyer with Friedman and Friedman
in Bridgeport, Conn. After several years
as an advocate, he sought a new approach to resolving disputes through
increasing the participation of the parties in the resolution of their
differences. At that time, he and Jack Himmelstein began
to develop a model of mediation—the Understanding
Based Model—that is now practiced extensively in the US and
Europe.
As
one of the first lawyer mediators and a primary force in the current
mediation movement, he has used this model to complete over 2,000
mediations in the last 4 decades, including numerous two- party and
multi-party disputes in the commercial and non-profit realms, in the
area of intellectual property, real estate,
corporate, personnel, partnership formations and dissolutions, and
family law. He has trained lawyers, law professors and
judges in the Center’s method of mediation and a mediative approach to
lawyering and collaborative practice. He has trained
lawyers, judges and psychotherapists in the US and
Israel, has taught courses in negotiation
and mediation at Stanford University Law School and the New College of
Law, has lectured at other law schools, at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation and at the World
Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva.
He
has written extensively about mediation and conflict resolution and
is the author of A Guide to Divorce Mediation. In collaboration with the Harvard Law School’s Program on
Negotiation, he is featured as the mediator in an educational video,
Saving the Last Dance: Mediation Through Understanding,
which applies the Center’s model to a highly charged dispute within a
non-profit. He is the co-author, with Jack Himmelstein, of Challenging
Conflict: Mediation Through Understanding. In his latest
insightful book, Inside Out: How Conflict Professionals Can Use
Self-Reflection to Help Their Clients. This book is based on a
program that Gary, along with colleague Jack Himmelstein (a law
professor and lawyer) and Norman Fischer (a Buddhist monk), has been
teaching for the last 13 years.
More recently, he has been applying the Center’s model of dealing with
conflict to programs on dialogue between the races and in the area of journalism.
