Thirty years of workplace disputes, from three different chairs.

I began in equal employment opportunity work in 1988 and spent more than ten years at the U.S. Department of Labor. At the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs I served as Assistant District Director in the Oakland district office, and in the San Francisco regional office as OFCCP Liaison and Regional Civil Rights Officer. I was the person auditing employers.

I then crossed to the other side. For four years I ran systemwide EEO compliance for the Office of the President at the University of California. At Morgan Lewis & Bockius I was a Senior Attorney advising employers through federal audits, EEO complaints, and the ordinary friction of managing people.

Somewhere in those decades a pattern became obvious. Most workplace disputes are not really about the legal question. They are about someone feeling unheard, a manager who handled a conversation badly, or two reasonable people with incompatible accounts of the same meeting. Litigation is a poor instrument for any of that. It is slow, it is public, it costs more than the underlying disagreement is worth, and it usually ends the relationship.

Mediation is the better instrument, and it has been part of my practice for over twenty years. The training started even earlier: at Georgetown Law I took first place in the school’s inaugural Negotiations Competition.

I mediate remotely across the United States and in person throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, where my enforcement career began.