Olivia Uzan

Biographical Info

Few attorneys practice on two continents. Olivia is one of them—admitted to both the Paris and California bars, with more than 20 years in employment and labor law and roughly 100 employment, discrimination, and harassment disputes mediated over the past six years. Her career has always sat at the crossroads of two legal cultures. From Paris, she spent over two decades partnering with American counsel on the cross-border employment and family-law tangles that arise when French and U.S. lives—and companies—overlap. That work is what led her to sit for the California bar: she wanted to carry a case across the Atlantic herself, not hand it off at the border.

That bicultural fluency is her real edge at the table. She thinks in French and in English, reads a French labor code and a California statute with equal ease, and—just as importantly—hears what each side is actually saying beneath the words. Mediation, in the end, is translation: not only between languages, but between positions. She stays firmly neutral without ever going passive. Olivia came up in courtrooms where nothing was conceded lightly, and she brings that same energy to helping two parties reach an agreement they can both live with.

Olivia trained at the Université La Sorbonne in Paris and completed Harvard Law School's mediation training. She is most at home wherever laws, languages, and cultures meet.

Fluent in Both Sides

Olivia has built her entire career on one skill: making two worlds understand each other. A French employee and an American employer are often not simply disagreeing—they are working from different assumptions about what is fair, what is owed, and how the conversation is even supposed to go. Olivia has spent two decades standing in that gap, and she has learned that most impasses are misunderstandings wearing the costume of principle.

So she does not merely relay offers—she reframes them. She explains each side's reasoning to the other in language they can genuinely hear, getting them to say “yes”.

Practice Areas

Employment Claims
Discrimination
Sexual Harassment
Cross-Border and International Employment Dispute
Labor Law