Erik Seidel

Erik Seidel served as a New York City Police Lieutenant for over 20 years. He has argued for the institution and against it, for the state and for the individual, from inside a general counsel's office and from a litigator's chair. He served in the New York City Police Department's Legal Bureau defending civil rights claims, prosecuted criminal cases for the State of Florida, ran a legal department as chief legal officer of a publicly traded company. Parties sometimes ask a mediator to prove he can be fair to the other side. Erik's answer is his resume. He has represented the other side, whichever side that happens to be.

What connects every one of those posts is communication. As the Police Department's liaison to the New York City Corporation Counsel, his job was to make two large organizations understand each other well enough to make decisions together. As a prosecutor in Palm Beach County's Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, he tried cases to juries who needed complicated facts made plain. As chief legal officer, he translated legal exposure into terms a board could act on. And representing special needs children and their families in securing appropriate educational services, he sat with people in genuine distress and helped them be heard by systems that were not listening. Mediation asks for the same skill in a smaller room.

Erik also serves as a public arbitrator with FINRA, hearing disputes between investors and the securities industry. Arbitration is a useful discipline for a mediator. An arbitrator does not get to split the difference or hope the parties sort it out later; he has to sit through both presentations, weigh them honestly, and decide. Erik carries those evaluative habits into mediation, though toward a different end to help the parties identify reasonable concessions, and ultimately find agreement.

Erik likes to sort signal from noise. He will ask questions until the real interests surface, which are often not the ones in the pleadings, and he reality-tests both sides privately so that nobody has to lose face to reconsider a position. He is candid about risk when candor helps, and he is patient when patience helps more. When the numbers stall, he goes back to what each party actually needs and looks for the part of the deal that is not about money, because there almost always is one. What he does is make sure each side gets to say the thing it came to say, out loud, to someone actually listening, because a party who feels unheard rarely settles.

Erik is a licensed attorney in Florida, New York, and New Jersey. He mediates in person throughout South Florida and by Zoom or Teams anywhere in the world.