Gary J. Friedman has bee practicing law as a mediation with the MEdiation Law Offices in Mill Valley, California, since 1976, integrating meditative principles into the practice of law and the resolution of legal disputes. Through the non-profit organization which he co-founded, The Center for Understanding in Conflict (formerly the Center for Mediation in Law), he has been teaching mediation since 1980.

Prior to his work as a mediator, he practiced law as a trial lawyer with Friedman and Friedman in Bridgeport, Connecticut. 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 his colleague, Jack Himmelstein, began to develop a model of mediation – the Understanding Based Model – that is now practiced extensively in the United States and Europe.

As on the of the first lawyer mediators and a primary force in the current mediation movement, he has used this model to complete over 1,000 mediations in the last two decades, including numerous two-multiparty and multi-party disputes in the commercial and non-profit realms, in the areas of intellectual property, real estate, corporate, personnel, partnership formations and dissolutions, and family law. Examples include contractual disputes concerning the supply of power and co-ownership of generation facilities between large public utilities; a dispute with a hospital resulting in a restructuring of the relationship between the medical and administrative personnel; an environmental dispute over the use of a natural preserve; a dispute within a major symphony orchestra; a dissolution of a major law firm; an intellectual property dispute between a publisher and author of a series of highly successful books; and a conflict within a religious organization between the head and the residential community.

Through the Center for Mediation in 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. Since 1989, he has been training lawyers, judges, psychotherapists in the United States, Europe, and Israel. He has taught courses in negotiation and mediation at Stanford University Law School and the New College of Law, has lectured frequently at numerous other law schools, and has taught 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, Workman Publishing 1993. 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 (published by the American Bar Association and Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, 2008).