Lela is an IAM Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient. She is a professor of law and the founding director of the Kukin Program for Conflict Resolution at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (NYC).

Lela has served as mediator, arbitrator and dispute resolution consultant in community, employment, family, human rights, school-based and commercial cases. An active educator and participant in dispute resolution activities, she regularly conducts mediation training programs and courses both domestic and international.

Lela is Past Chair of the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolution. In her chair year she initiated the first International Mediation Leadership Summit in the Hague. Her mediation of a public policy dispute in Glen Cove, NY, brought widespread publicity to the use of mediation in resolving complex litigation.

She has written widely on the topic of dispute resolution, including co-authoring three law school textbooks. Among her books are: The Middle Voice, co-authored with Joseph Stulberg, and two collections of stories about mediations—Stories Mediators Tell and Stories Mediators Tell—World Edition.

The International Academy of Mediators gave Lela a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012; the American College of Civil Trial Mediators gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010; and she received the “Front Line Champion” Award at the Association of the Bar of NYC on Mediation Settlement Day (2009).

Giuseppe is Former United Nations Ombudsman & Director of JAMS International. He was co-founder and chairman of the board of ADR Center in Rome, Italy, one of the largest providers of conflict management and alternative dispute resolution services in Europe. In this capacity, Giuseppe mediated over 700 disputes, and served as project director in a wide range of initiatives around the world, including in Afghanistan, Serbia, Kenya, Barbados, Nigeria, Turkey and throughout the Middle-East and the European Union. Giuseppe concurrently served as director of London-based JAMS International, a subsidiary of JAMS, the largest private provider of alternative dispute resolution services in the United States, with resolution centers nationwide and abroad. He is an international professor of alternative dispute resolution law and practice at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, where he teaches Advanced Negotiation, Cross-Cultural Negotiation, and Mediation. He was an associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now Wilmer Hale) in Brussels, Belgium.

Christopher will be the Moderator of this webinar.

Christopher has been a leading pioneer in developing alternative dispute resolution in Asia for over three decades. He is a barrister-at-law, independent arbitrator, adjudicator, mediator and domain name specialist with qualifications in engineering and computing, and he currently sits on the panels of more than 40 alternative dispute resolution institutions. Over the years, Christopher has arbitrated, adjudicated, and mediated more than 1,000 international and domestic cases.

He has consistently received recognition for his work in alternative dispute resolution, such as being awarded Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and recognized by the International Who’s Who Legal as a Thought Leader in arbitration and mediation.

As former Secretary-General of the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre for a decade, Christopher elevated Hong Kong’s position as an international dispute resolution services centre on par with leading global arbitration centres. He also created the Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre, which is internationally recognized in the dot.com community for resolving domain name disputes.

Christopher has authored or co-authored 14 books on the subject of dispute resolution. His two latest publications are Mediation in Hong Kong: Law and Practice (Wolters Kluwer Law & Business, 2022) and The Arbitration Ordinance (Cap.609) in the Annotated Ordinances of Hong Kong (LexisNexis Butterworths, 2022). In addition, Christopher was the chief architect behind the establishing and publishing of the Asian Dispute Review Journal, the leading Asian alternative dispute resolution journal.

Since 2019, Christopher has served as the Programme Director of the programme for Master of Laws in Arbitration and Dispute Resolution at the City University of Hong Kong. He currently serves as Chairperson of the Hong Kong Mediation Council Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary within the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre, Chairperson of the Hong Kong Institute of Directors, and Chairperson of the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers, Construction Dispute Resolution Committee.