In EP6, host Oladeji Tiamiyu speaks with Hari Osofsky, the recently appointed Dean of Northwestern School of Law, and Alyson Carrel, the co-Director of Northwestern’s Center on Negotiation and Mediation. They discuss the role of technology in the future of legal education and explore Hari’s thoughts on the UN’s recently published climate change report.
“Convergence” is a bi-weekly, limited series of conversations with thought-leaders and practitioners at the intersection of dispute resolution and technology. Host Oladeji Tiamiyu will focus on such topics as the role technology has had in resolving disputes during the pandemic, various ways technological tools have historically been incorporated into dispute resolution, and creative use cases that technology presents for resolving disputes into the future.
Host
Guests
Alyson Carrel is a clinical associate professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and the Co-Director of the law school’s nationally-ranked Center on Negotiation and Mediation. Carrel is an active leader, presenter, and trainer in dispute resolution. She has provided negotiation and dispute resolution trainings for a wide variety of clients including large law firms like Baker McKenzie, court systems/programs such as the Cook County Juvenile Court Child Protection Mediation Program, government organizations such as HUD, corporations such as Coca-Cola, and nonprofit organizations including the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Until 2019, she led the law school’s legal technology & innovation initiatives as the Assistant Dean of Law & Technology. In these roles, she received a grant to purchase wearable cameras for negotiation simulation courses, a fellowship to integrate the A2J Author platform in mediation advocacy courses, launched TEaCH LAW, a faculty instructional technology initiative, and was awarded the student-voted Outstanding Professor of a Small Class. Carrel is currently researching the impact of emerging technology in dispute resolution and developing a new client-driven competency model for the 21st-century legal professional called the Delta Model.
Carrel has mediated a wide range of disputes and was selected to participate as a neutral in the McReynolds v. Merrill Lynch class action settlement. Prior to her appointment at Northwestern Law, Carrel was the Training Director at the Center for Conflict Resolution, one of the nation’s largest and longest-running community mediation centers, where she directed and lectured in the 40-hour mediation skills training and mediated court-referred cases.
Before attending law school and prior to working at CCR, Carrel managed the Dependency Mediation Program for the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida, which provides mediation services to parties involved in child protection/dependency matters. She also worked with the Juvenile Mediation Clinic at the University of Florida School of Law, where she helped train and manage law school clinic students in small-claims mediation, victim-offender mediation, and conflict resolution skills.
Carrel received her JD from the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she published a case note on drafting an effective ADR contract clause and was the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Dispute Resolution. She received her BA in Women’s Studies from the University of Florida where she wrote a thesis focused on domestic relations mediation.
Hari M. Osofsky is Dean and Myra and James Bradwell Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and Professor of Environmental Policy and Culture (courtesy) at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
As Dean, she is deeply committed to building legal education for a changing society through inclusive collaboration. Her leadership focuses on preparing students to lead in our changing society and profession; advancing diversity, equity and inclusion and social and racial justice; learning from the COVID-19 pivots; and innovating through interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder, and international partnerships. She also is very involved in mentorship and sponsorship to support greater diversity in law school and university leadership. The American Bar Association’s Legal Technology Resource Center recognized her as one of the 2019 Women of Legal-Tech.
Dean Osofsky’s over 50 publications focus on improving governance and addressing injustice in energy and climate change regulation. Her scholarship includes books with Cambridge University Press on climate change litigation, textbooks on both energy and climate change law, and articles in leading law and geography journals. Dean Osofsky’s Emory Law Journal article, Energy Partisanship, was awarded the 2018 Morrison Prize, which recognizes the most impactful sustainability-related legal academic article published in North America during the previous year. Dean Osofsky has collaborated extensively with business, government, and nonprofit leaders to make bipartisan progress on these issues through her leadership roles and teaching. She is a fellow of the American College of Environmental Lawyers.
Her professional leadership roles have included, among others, serving as president of the Association for Law, Property, and Society and as a member of the Dean’s Steering Committee of the American Association of Law Schools, Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, International Law Association’s Committee on the Legal Principles of Climate Change, Board of Governors of the Society of American Law Teachers, and editorial board of Climate Law. Her leadership and mentorship work was recognized by the Association for Law, Property, and Society’s 2016 Distinguished Service Award and the University of Minnesota 2015 Sara Evans Faculty Woman Scholar/Leader Award.
Dean Osofsky received a PhD in geography from the University of Oregon and a JD from Yale Law School. She clerked for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Prior to joining Northwestern University, Dean Osofsky served as dean of Penn State Law and the Penn State School of International Affairs and on the faculties of University of Minnesota Law School, Washington and Lee University School of Law, the University of Oregon School of Law, and Whittier Law School.
Resources
“Hari M. Osofsky named dean of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law”
