Alan Friedman

An accomplished business litigator and trained mediator, Alan Friedman brings a wide range of experience and skills to help you resolve your case. His interest in settlement began in 1969, when he published a pathbreaking settlement analysis article in the Stanford Law Review, 22 Stan.L.Rev. 67 (1969). In 46 years of practice since, he has litigated, arbitrated, and mostly settled a huge variety of cases in a broad range of industries.

Alan is at home in the work of settlement bargaining, whether there are two parties or multiple parties. He has been settling cases since the early 1970s. He began mediating when he served as an L.A. superior court settlement officer in the 1980s in the Joint Association Settlement Officer Program of the LACBA. Among his accomplishments in that program, he settled a toxic cleanup case involving eleven insurers at the pleading stage before any discovery!

As a mediator, Alan doesn’t simply ferry offers and counteroffers back and forth among the parties. He helps the parties evaluate their cases in light of their own probability assessments, estimated costs and payoffs, and risk aversions. Cases rarely have single expected values; they have probability distributions of outcomes that must be gauged by the parties’ risk preferences. Alan knows how to help the parties do what they think is best for them.