Louise Phipps Senft is a lawyer and mediation expert who is best known for integrating transformative frameworks into her legal work. She founded the Baltimore Mediation Center in 1993, now the Louise Phipps Senft and Associates/Baltimore Mediation, the first mediation firm in Maryland with a focus on relational approaches to conflict resolution. The firm offers mediation, facilitation for collaborative decision-making and conflict resolution training with emphasis on mediator self-awareness, fostering quality interaction, empowerment,
informed decision-making g by the parties, and recognition. With over 20 years experience, Louise is celebrated nationally for her elicitive design and delivery of conflict resolution and transformation skills training and mediation for individuals and organizations across all sectors.
As a certified Enneagram teacher in the Narrative Tradition, Louise offers Enneagram workshops on greater productivity and personal satisfaction, emotional intelligence and self-awareness for executives, managers, judges and families. She has pioneered the reliance on self-awareness and the Enneagram for the conflict resolution and mediation communities as a means of quality practice and personal excellence. As an Enneagram professional, she is associated with the Trifold School for Enneagram Studies and the International Association of Enneagram Teachers in the Narrative Tradition.
Since 1998, Louise has been an adjunct Law Professor at the University of Maryland School of Law teaching various courses in Alternative Methods of Dispute Resolution (ADR) for lawyers, Negotiation and Mediation Theory and Practice. As a member of the faculty of the Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation Insight Initiative, she teaches conflict transformation theory and self-awareness practices and has joined Helen Palmer teaching the Enneagram. She is also faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. Louise is an elected Associate of the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and is a nationally Certified Transformative Mediator™. She is one of the founding members of Mediators Beyond Borders™, a non-profit offering conflict resolution aid and training for initiatives such as the Child Soldier Project in Ghana and the Katrina Mediation Project where she serves as Executive Chair of Training.
Louise writes a monthly column for The Daily Record, “The Negotiating Table: Turning Problems into Opportunities”. Her work with corporate and public policy multiparty facilitation is featured in the book the Promise of Mediation (Jossey-Bass, 2004). She has been a guest on an NPR radio affiliate and other radio programs and is the author
of numerous training manuals, published by Baltimore Mediation, as well as many other articles. In 2007, Louise was honored with one of the Baltimore Business Journal’s “Most Enterprising Woman” awards for 2007. She was voted “Baltimore’s Best” Mediator by Baltimore Magazine 2002 and named one of “Maryland’s Top 100 Women” for the year
2004 and 2007 by The Daily Record, and is often invited to provide thought-provoking keynotes.
Louise attended the University of Virginia and Washington & Lee School of Law, was named Most Outstanding Woman Law Student, and is married and the mother of five children.
