Mediator, Mediation Law Offices
Co-Founder, The Center for Understanding in Conflict
Since 1976, Gary Friedman has been practicing law as a mediator with Mediation Law Offices, and since 1980, he has been teaching mediation through the Center for Understanding in Conflict, which he co-founded. In partnership with his colleague, Jack Himmelstein, he developed a new model of mediation—the Understanding-Based Model—that is now practiced extensively in the United States 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 one thousand mediations in the last two decades, including numerous two-party and multiparty disputes in the commercial and nonprofit realms, in the areas of intellectual property, real estate, corporate, personnel, partnership formations and dissolutions, and family law.
In addition to training lawyers, law professors, and judges through the Center for Understanding in Conflict, he has also taught courses in negotiation and mediation at Stanford University Law School, the New College of Law, Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, and the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. A prolific writer, Friedman has published three books on mediation.
Education
B.A., Brown University
J.D., Boston University School of Law
Research interests
Mediation, conflict resolution, self-awareness, law, negotiation
Selected publications
- A Guide to Divorce Mediation. Workman Publishing, 1993.
- With Jack Himmelstein. Challenging Conflict: Mediation through Understanding. ABA Publishing and Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, 2008.
- Inside Out: How Conflict Professionals Can Use Self-Reflection to Help Their Clients. ABA Publishing and Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, 2014.