This website has a simple goal – to spread the word about the benefits of using mediation as a means of resolving environmental disputes.
In contrast to litigation, environmental ADR offers a streamlined process that is well suited to resolving complicated, multi-party disputes. It is also a process that lends itself particularly well to the sort of science-based inquiry, which underlies many environmental legal controversies. The blog posts and case studies that I’ll be publishing on this web site will provide real world examples of how well the mediation process works in fashioning effective outcomes for these cases.
The significant benefits of environmental mediation have become evident to me in the course of my career. Over the last twenty years I’ve had the opportunity to mediate hundreds of environmental cases, large and small, involving virtually every aspect of environmental law and science. From this first hand experience, I’ve come to know just how effective mediation can be.
But while environmental mediation is well established in some parts of the country (particularly in California and other western states), it is far less accepted and less frequently utilized elsewhere. This strikes me as anomalous given that environmental law is a field primarily driven by federal law and dominated by large law firms, usually with a national footprint, so a partner in San Francisco would presumably have ample opportunity to share best practice insights with partners in Washington and New York. Yet for some reason that doesn’t seem to have occurred and that is precisely why I decided to build this web site.
Of course, as a professional mediator, I hope this site will help to expand the market for my services. But this is not just a matter of self-promotion. Environmental mediation has proven to be incredibly effective for all parties concerned. So whether you’re an environmental lawyer, a corporate risk manager or an insurance executive underwriting environmental risk, I hope my experience and insights will prove useful in your own work and practice, as a means of attaining faster, cheaper and more rational outcomes to your environmental disputes.
I mediate many types of cases but this website will focus primarily on the environment and alternate dispute resolution processes the are designed to settle environmental conflicts. Much of the content about the mediation process that appears on this site is equally applicable to many other substantive areas of conflict.
