Michael Dickstein serves as a senior consultant for Mobius Executive Leadership. He is a San Francisco based mediator, arbitrator, negotiation/ADR teacher, and attorney. Michael teaches negotiation and mediation at Stanford Law School, is a former partner in one of America’s leading law firms (Heller Ehrman et al.), was the National Co-Chair of the Association for Conflict Resolution’s Workplace Section from 2001–2004, and is currently on ACR’s Workplace Section Advisory Board.
In addition to teaching at Stanford, Michael has taught introductory and advanced classes on negotiation, mediation and ADR worldwide (including in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, England, Ireland, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and St. Lucia). He has taught in conjunction with such institutions as Boalt Hall Law School (U.C. Berkeley), the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California, and the University of San Francisco (where he was an adjunct professor in the MBA program).
Michael has mediated and successfully settled cases on a wide variety of topics (including commercial, employment, contract, real estate, personal injury, discrimination, franchise, malpractice, construction defect, class action, and defamation issues). Examples of Michael’s work include: facilitating the contract negotiations between Canada’s theatre actors and major theatre owners; mediating nationwide class actions with as many as 60,000 class members and hundreds of millions of dollars in dispute; arbitrating claims in a class action against a major financial institution; mediating a multi-party international contract dispute; and mediating/facilitating discussions between a nationwide non-profit, its CFO, its regional advisory board, its regional executive director, and its regional staff.
Michael has published and spoken extensively on negotiation and mediation, and he has presided over appeals of small claims actions and settlement conferences, as a judge pro tem for the San Francisco Superior Court, and small claims trials, for the San Francisco and Alameda Courts.
Michael earned his A.B. with honors from Harvard College in 1981, and J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School in 1985.