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Lee Jay Berman began as a full-time mediator 27 years ago, and has successfully mediated over 2,600 matters, many of which were high profile cases. He is an American Arbitration Association Master Mediator for employment matters, and national panelist on their commercial and construction panels. He is a Distinguished Fellow with the International Academy of Mediators, a Charter Diplomat with the National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals (NADN), certified by the International Mediation Institute, and a Dispute Resolution Expert with the United Nations Development Programme. NADN named him their inaugural “Distinguished Neutral of the Year” in 2017. California’s Daily Journal twice named him “Top Neutral”, he has been voted by his colleagues into the Who’s Who of International Commercial Mediation from 2012-2021, and ranked by Chambers USA as one of the top 40 commercial mediators in the U.S. from 2018-2021.
A respected trainer, Lee Jay founded the American Institute of Mediation, after seven years as Director of Pepperdine Law School’s Mediating the Litigated Case program. He has trained mediators, judges, attorneys, and business leaders across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and in such places as India, Dubai, Uzbekistan, Australia, New Zealand, and throughout Europe. In 2010, the Southern California Mediation Association honored Lee Jay by making him the third ever recipient of the L. Randolph Lowry Award for his dedication to training mediators in the profession.
Lee Jay has published numerous articles on mediation, and the American Bar Association will be publishing two of his books in 2021 and 2022.
Known as the MINDSET Doc, Dr. Debra Dupree strives to make a difference in the lives of people she touches by providing insight and vision for leveraging the mindset for new perspectives and opportunities when it comes to resolving conflict and improving communication.
As the former Director of Training for Mediation Training Institute (MTI), she worked directly with Dr. Dan Dana, a forerunner in the field of dispute resolution, training attorneys and human resource professionals in Workplace Mediation throughout N.A. She serves as a Senior Mentor Mediator and Trainer for the DON since 2000 and on numerous mediation panels. Her niche market is workplace mediation and facilitating the interactive process for employees with medical conditions. Dr. D is on the SCMA Board of Directors, a ABA Dispute Resolution Section member, the AAA Mediator Employment Law Panel, and faculty at AAA Mediation.
Bill Eddy is a mediator, lawyer (CFLS) and therapist (LCSW). He has been doing divorce mediation for the past 40 years, most recently including 15 years as the Senior Family Mediator at the National Conflict Resolution Center in San Diego, California. He is also the co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of the High Conflict Institute, for which he has trained lawyers, mediators, judges, mental health professionals and others on managing high-conflict personalities in over 30 states and ten countries. He is the developer of the New Ways for Families® skills-training method for high conflict divorce and New Ways for Mediation® method for high conflict cases. He has written twenty books and manuals, including the new co-authored book BIFF for CoParent Communication: Your Guide to Difficult CoParent Texts, Emails and Social Media Posts.
Harold Coleman, Jr. Esq., is an award-winning dispute resolution practitioner, educator, and peace-building champion. He is an attorney, arbitrator, mediator, conciliator, facilitator, teacher, trainer, speaker, writer and conflict coach.
Harold is senior vice president for mediation at the American Arbitration Association (AAA)… the global dispute resolution leader, and mediator/executive director for AAA Mediation.org…an AAA technology innovation that trains and develops mediators, promotes their practices, and connects them with a diverse community of users and ADR thought leaders worldwide. He also trains new AAA arbitrators and aspiring mediators in basic/advanced arbitration case management techniques and basic/advanced mediation skills.
As a neutral, Peter has been an active arbitrator since 1986 and a mediator since 1990. He is a member of the American Arbitration Association Large, Complex Case Arbitration Panel, the Conflict Prevention & Resolution Panel of Distinguished Neutrals, and the Ohio Chapter of the National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals. He is also the sole United States arbitrator on the Chair/Sole Arbitrator Panel of the European Union-based International Distribution Institute, which offers expedited arbitration for international distribution and franchising disputes. He founded and is a trustee of the Early Dispute Resolution Institute. Peter currently chairs the Early Dispute Resolution Task Force for the International Franchise Association, and the Dispute Resolution Committee of the Ohio Bar Association Corporations Committee, and formerly chaired the Early Dispute Resolution Committee of the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolution and the Litigation and Dispute Resolution Committee of the American Bar Association Franchising Forum. He teaches seminars nationwide and writes widely on alternative dispute resolution.
Clients look to Peter for his business experience. From 2013-2016, Peter was an active partner in the Oasis restaurant chain, which was elected to the Northwest Ohio Entrepreneurial & Business Excellence Hall of Fame in 2014. Between 2004 and 2010, Peter owned and was President of Hi-Genomics, a biotechnology company that genetically transformed plants. Committed to helping entrepreneurial businesses, he received the 1989 Ernst and Young/Inc. Magazine Entrepreneur of the Year Award for his work in helping business owners start and grow their businesses. In addition, Peter is an individual member of the University of Toledo and Bowling Green State University Entrepreneurial & Business Excellence Hall Of Fame.
Peter currently serves as co-chair of the Toledo Community-Police Relations and Reform Committee, and on the board of the Toledo Chabad House, and he teaches Sunday School. As a public official, he formerly served on the Toledo City Council, the Toledo School Board, and the Ohio Casino Commission.
Lydia is a mediator, attorney, and associate law school dean at hybrid online law school, ALU. She earned her J.D. at Loyola Law School and LL.M in ADR at USC Gould School of law, which provided great opportunities with remote mediation via video conferencing, phone and in-person mediation for the U.S. EEOC, DFEH and Children’s Court in Monterey Park. Over the years, assisting with academic concerns/disputes using ombuds techniques, as well as online dispute resolution with the L.A. County Dept. of Consumer and Business Affairs, L.A. Superior Court Daily/Virtual Settlement Officer program and LACBA virtual arbitrations, she looks forward to sharing online mediation techniques focused upon emotional intelligence and trauma-informed advising to advance your practice!
Affectionately referred to by his loyal client base of 22 years as “the guy who settles everything,” Gene Moscovitch has been one of the most highly regarded and strongly sought-after commercial mediators in the western USA. While his actual settlement rate more accurately approximates 90 – 95 per cent, he is universally acclaimed as “the ultimate closer” in his fiercely competitive market of Los Angeles.
Gene has settled well over 3,000 litigated cases involving often divisive and highly emotional disputes of all kinds, including class actions, primarily in the subject areas of Employment Law and Civil Rights. In doing so, he has relied heavily upon his previous 25-year career as a highly acclaimed trial lawyer.
He has consistently been ranked among the top neutrals in California by the Los Angeles Daily Journal and has been routinely included in the Super Lawyers and Best Lawyers lists for Mediation since their inception. Additionally, he has been featured on several occasions as a speaker for the American and LA County Bar Associations, CAALA, CELA and SCDC
Notably, Gene is a Past President of the International Academy of Mediators and recently completed his 11th year of service on its esteemed Board of Governors. During that period, he organized and presented at international mediation conferences in Queenstown, New Zealand; Edinburgh, Scotland; and Vancouver, British Columbia.
In 2018, he was invited to travel to Kenya and engage in the training of High Court judges from numerous countries across East Africa. He also had the opportunity to lecture at Nairobi’s most prestigious legal institutions. This year, he served as a lead presenter in a major virtual presentation for the Hong Kong Mediation Association. Gene continues to maintain close ties with the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), participating as a Judge for its annual Mediation Competition based in Paris, France. He hopes to do more mediation-related teaching in the years ahead, both in Los Angeles and abroad.
Richard Erhard served public education agencies for nearly three decades in two states, culminating with his position as an assistant superintendent of student services. He is currently | Principal | Owner of the consulting firm, Richard Erhard and Associates, LLC, which he formed to provide mediation and consultation services focusing on educational disputes. He provides consultation, coaching and professional development workshops to assist organizations and individuals with identifying and effectively communicating their areas of agreement and disagreement to reach mutually agreed upon solutions. His clients include school districts, non-profit organizations and private individuals throughout Southern California and most recently New Mexico.
Mr. Erhard is a frequent presenter on the use of alternative dispute resolution in public education, speaking at educational conferences and, while serving on the State SELPA ADR Steering Committee, twice hosted the California Special Education Annual Alternative Dispute Resolution Conference. He’s received invitations to speak at LRP’s National Institute on Legal Issues of Educating Individuals with Disabilities as well as the American Bar Association’s Dispute Resolution Annual Spring Conferences.
Mr. Erhard is currently an associate member of the American Bar Association and the San Diego County Bar Association, Alternative Dispute Resolution Sections. He also serves on the board of directors of the Southern California Mediation Association, where he serves as their Program Committee Co-Chair, as well as the 2020 President Elect. Mr. Erhard will assume the Presidency of the SCMA in December, 2021.
In January 2019, Mr. Erhard joined the part-time faculty of the University of Southern California (USC) Gould School of Law, Center for Conflict Resolution, as a lecturer in law, where he teaches a course in special education dispute resolution. His unique course, which teaches law students to resolve disputes with school district and their programs, was featured in the Fall/Winter 2019 issue of the USC Law Magazine in the article, Across the Table: the need for neutrals in special education. In 2020, the USC Center for Dispute Resolution published an article by Mr. Erhard in their ADR Fall Quarterly on the topic, Resolving Special Education Disputes in the era of COVID-19. This past fall 2021, USC requested Mr. Erhard submit his follow-up article, In The Wake of COVID-19: an awakening of special education dispute resolution, where he discusses the newly funded 2021 California Assembly Bill, (AB-967) COVID-19 special education dispute resolution fund. On November 2, 2021, Mr. Erhard will be featured by the USC Center for Dispute Resolution virtual lecture series in his presentation: The Human Condition: Is disability special, exceptional, or merely a fact of life? Here, Mr. Erhard discusses special education in the United States, since its inception in 1975, through current day in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jennifer’s career is well rounded, dating back to her obtaining her B.S.N, with honors from the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University twenty years ago and continuing on through her scholarship to Case Western Reserve University School of Law where she obtained her J.D. with a certificate in health law from the perennially recognized Law and Medicine Center and served as an associate editor on the Health Matrix: Journal of Law and Medicine. Before forming a boutique firm, Jennifer worked at law firms in Los Angeles and Chicago.
She is admitted to the state bars of California and Illinois and has completed the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s mediation training and mediation training at the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine University. She is active in many professional organizations, including the Southern California Mediation Association, where she serves on the Public Outreach and Attorney Outreach Committees.
She is a registered nurse in the state of California and has worked as a clinical nurse in Cleveland and Los Angeles. Jennifer is married to a physician and together, they are raising three great children.
Steve Paul is a full-time mediator based in Southern California, primarily mediating employment and commercial disputes. Steve has been an Adjunct Professor at the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution for the past several years, where he teaches employment dispute resolution. Steve frequently lectures and speaks on mediation, conflict resolution and negotiation, and is a Distinguished Fellow and the President-Elect of the International Academy of Mediators. Prior to becoming a mediator, Steve was in-house legal and business affairs counsel at Warner Bros. Studios, where he handled labor/employment issues and provided legal oversight of the Studio’s day-to-day operations. Steve graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley, and received his law degree from Berkeley Law School.
Wendy W. Kramer is a highly effective full-time mediator. Formerly a partner with Kramer & Kramer handling a wide variety of insurance-related matters, she has developed particular expertise in matters involving personal injury (vehicular accidents, premises liability, dogbites, bicycle accidents, public entities, DUI, wrongful death, catastrophic injuries, products liability), business disputes, professional malpractice, real estate, landlord tenant disputes (habitability) and complex commercial litigation.
In addition to serving as the 2013 President of the Southern California Mediation Association, Ms. Kramer previously served as the SCMA’s Mentorship Program Chair, ADR Chair for the Santa Monica Bar Association, a panel mediator for the Los Angeles and Ventura Superior Courts ADR Programs, and a Fee Dispute Mediator for both the Beverly Hills and Santa Monica Bar Associations, as well as on the Board of Governors for the International Academy of Mediation (IAM). She currently serves as the Chair of the IAM’s Mentorship Program. She has mediated over 3,500 matters and arbitrated over 300 matters. She is known for her ability to deal with difficult personalities, multi-party matters and complicated legal issues.
Susan Guthrie, nationally recognized as one of the Top Family Law and Mediation Attorneys in the United States, has been helping individuals and families navigate separation and divorce for more than 30 years. Susan is passionate about helping people to find a better path through divorce than the traditional adversarial litigation method and is one of the leading divorce mediators in the country. Susan has also recently partnered with mediation legend, Forrest “Woody” Mosten, to create the Mosten Guthrie Academy to provide cutting edge gold-standard trainings for attorneys, mediators and other professionals. As one of the best known names in the divorce world, Susan also recently launched a membership community to accompany her top podcast, The Divorce & Beyond Podcast with Susan Guthrie, Esq., which provides subscribers with additional support, resources and advice from the voice you can trust. The podcast is one of the top divorce podcasts on the air and has reach millions of listeners.
As a leading dispute resolution professional, Susan is honored to serve on the Executive Council of the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Section of Dispute Resolution as the Budget Officer (2021-2022) and to be the Chair of the Inaugural Practice Development Institute coming virtually in 2022. Susan is also honored to serve on the Board of the Southern California Mediation Association and to be an honorary member of the National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals (NADN.)
Susan is also an internationally well-regarded expert in online mediation and has been training colleagues and other professionals in the practical and ethical considerations of conducting their mediations online with her innovative programs and webinars for more than two years. To date, more than 17,000 dispute resolution professionals have benefited from her program and she has trained mediators in countries all around the world including programs for the American Bar Association (ABA), the Alternative Dispute Resolution Institute of Canada (ADRIC), and the National Association of Distinguished Neutrals (NADN) among others. Susan founded Learn to Mediate Online™ in 2018 and now offers more than 7 programs for professionals all designed to help them to advance their skills and their practice to new heights.
Susan was recently awarded the prestigious L. Randolph Lowry Award from the Southern California Mediation Association for 2020 which is presented to a member of the dispute resolution community who has honored and inspired us through their passion and dedication to education in the field of dispute resolution. In addition, Susan was named to the Executive Committee of the newly formed Online Mediation Training Task Force, created to make recommendations regarding standards and practices in the field.
Susan has been featured in and on media outlets such as CNBC, Market Watch, Forbes, Eye on Chicago, WGN, the ABA’s Just Resolutions Magazine, Thrive Global, The Nook Online, Medium, Authority Magazine and She Knows among others.
She is licensed to practice law in the States of California and Connecticut as well as before the Supreme Court of the United States.
Susan Guthrie has been one of the leading family law attorneys and mediators in the country for more than 30 years. She is recognized as one of the best-known names in the field and is passionate in helping individuals and families to restructure in a positive way through the divorce process. Her award-winning podcast, The Divorce & Beyond Podcast, is one of the top 1.5 % of podcasts worldwide and she in known to millions of listeners around the world as the “divorce voice you can trust!”
Gary Doernhoefer is a 1984 graduate of the University of Chicago School of Law, an experienced general counsel, technology entrepreneur and founder of ADR Notable – the leading technology platform designed specifically for dispute resolution professionals.
Gary focused his entrepreneurial skills on dispute resolution after a legal career that included serving as in-house counsel to American Airlines; the first General Counsel for Orbitz, the travel website; co-founder and General Counsel for startup Accertify, Inc., now a subsidiary of AMEX; and General Counsel for the International Air Transport Association, which is the global trade association for the airline industry.
In 2016, discussions with the faculty at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University initially focusing on expanding the use of alternative dispute resolution for the airline industry shifted to exploring the need for technology to support dispute resolution professionals generally. By 2019, he had founded ADR Notable and completed prototype testing with over 30 mediators. This led to the development of the first comprehensive software platform designed specifically for both individual case and practice management for dispute resolution practitioners. ADR Notable launched commercial operations at the end of 2020.
As the President of Lipscomb University in Nashville and as founder and former director of the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution, Professor Randy Lowry is one of the nation’s leaders in the dispute resolution field. As a professor he provides academic leadership to Pepperdine’s extensive dispute resolution program, and is consulted regularly by other universities regarding their work in that field.
Randy has served as a visiting professor at Vermont Law School, University of New Mexico, University of Idaho, Abilene Christian University, Hamline University (Modena, Italy), City University of Hong Kong, as well as Bond University in Australia. As a teacher, he trains more than 4000 lawyers, judges, and managers in more that 25 states and several foreign countries each year.
Organizations that have utilized his training include Federal Judicial Center, National Judicial Institute (Canada), Nike, Lexis-Nexis, State Farm Insurance, Chevron, and hundreds of others. He is co-author of three books in dispute resolution.
Professor Lowry is also a practitioner of what he teaches, regularly mediating complex cases. Such experiences range from the resolution of multi-million dollar civil cases and public policy disputes in the United States to the resolution of organizational conflict in Nairobi, Kenya. In addition, he regularly consults with public and private sector organizations on the effective management of conflict.
Professor Lowry is the co-founder and the first president of the Southern California Mediation Association, and co-founder and board member of the Ventura Center for Dispute Settlement. He was a gubernatorial appointment to the California Dispute Resolution Advisory Council, which established California’s community dispute resolution programs. He served on the Judicial Council’s Task Force on the Quality of Justice, looking at dispute resolution and the courts. Recently he was appointed by the Chief Justice of California to the Blue Ribbon Committee on Arbitration Ethics. He has also held leadership roles in many professional associations, including the American Bar Association’s Torts and Insurance Practice Section.
B.A., Pepperdine University, 1974 M.P.A, Pepperdine University, 1977 J.D., Hamline University School of Law, 1981