John is an internationally recognized neutral, specializing in complex, multi-party disputes. He has logged over 30,000 hours and resolved more than four billion dollars in claims in more than forty states.  He has been retained by dozens of Fortune 500 companies, as well as all major domestic and many international insurers to resolve their commercial disputes. He has also facilitated the resolution of major natural resource, water and environmental disputes between the Federal government, Indian tribes and states, including five major water allocation or water diversion conflicts throughout the country.

John spent six years mediating a decades-long dispute over water rights between Denver and the West Slope communities of Colorado that produced the historic Colorado River Cooperative Agreement. A feature-length documentary reported on the negotiations and the settlement. He also negotiated a resolution of one of the most significant US fishing rights disputes between five Indian tribes, the State of Michigan, the United States, sports fishermen and environmentalists.  Environmental disputes in every EPA region of the United States have been arbitrated or mediated, including actions under CERCLA, RCRA, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, EPCRA and various state statutes. He has extensive experience   with government contractor claims for allocation against the United States under Superfund in addition to private allocation disputes among multiple parties.

In addition, John has successfully arbitrated and mediated more than $3 billion in complex commercial, construction and insurance coverage disputes.  The Insurance coverage disputes include legacy CGL policies with complicated allocation issues. He also arbitrated Bermuda form policies and manuscript policies.  He has experience with commercial business disputes in the technology, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, energy, finance, telecommunications, construction, and consumer products industries over claims of breach of contract, professional legal and accounting malpractice claims, wrongful discharge of senior executives, breach of warranty, and theft of intellectual property.

He is a past Chair of the ABA Section on Dispute Resolution.  He has BS and MS degrees in economics from Cornell University and is a magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown University Law Center.  He was a judicial clerk for federal district court Judge William B. Bryant. John is a Senior Visiting Lecturer at Cornell University where, for the past ten years, he has taught a class in Negotiating and Mediating Environmental Claims.

Prior to starting his legal career, John was the Research Director at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an influential think tank in Washington, DC.  In that role, he completed research projects that led to revisions in the military retirement system, the inflation adjustment to the SSI program, and the creation of a statistic that measures the percent of unemployed not receiving benefits.  His research efforts were highlighted in a lead editorial in the New York Times, and his opinion piece on the military retirement system was the lead article in a Washington Post Outlook section.