Mr Shapiro, is a Solicitor Advocate, is a member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, is accredited as a mediator by CEDR (Britain's Centre for Dispute Resolution), is former Chairman of The Panel of Independent Mediators, is a member of the Law Society's Commercial Mediation Panel, is a member of the Commercial Court's Working Party on ADR, is a member of the Panel of Distinguished Mediators, CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution (New York) and is a Fellow of the International Academy of Mediators. He was formerly Director and Chief Mediator of JAMS Endispute Europe and is currently Visiting Fellow, Department of Law, London School of Economics and Political Science, where he teaches mediation and mediation advocacy. He was organiser of and lead-off speaker on "Introduction to ADR", part of the Judicial Studies Board's Stage 1 seminars for more than 800 judges in England and Wales, has been a mediation consultant to the Supreme Commercial Court of the Russian Federation, and is a frequent lecturer and writer on ADR issues.

Until his retirement from his law firm in the United States in January 1996, Mr. Shapiro, now a permanent resident of the UK, was a senior founding partner of, and Head of Litigation at, Dickstein, Shapiro LLP, a 425-lawyer U.S. law firm with offices in New York Washington DC and Los Angeles.

Since arriving in the UK in 1996, he has successfully mediated more than 260 major disputes in this country and abroad and is acknowledged to be one of the most experienced mediators now practising in the UK and Europe. He has been a mediator for more than 25 years. In the USA in 1995 he was principal engineer of the new national class-action settlement of claims arising out of silicone breast implants, affecting more than 500,000 potential plaintiffs world-wide. In 1991 and 1992, he served as volunteer counsel to the City of St Petersburg, Russia where, inter alia, he established that country's first Food Bank. In 1990, he was the court-appointed Settlement Master in New York for hundreds of claims for injuries from asbestos. In 1988 he was the court-appointed Examiner (Special Master) in the bankruptcy proceedings for Eastern Airlines. In 1986 he served as Chairman of the American Bar Association's National Institute on "New Techniques for Resolving Complex Litigation." In 1985 he was a court-appointed Settlement Master in the "Agent Orange" litigation brought by Vietnam veterans for their exposure to dioxin. In 1981, after having litigated antitrust cases against American Telephone & Telegraph, leading to the Modified Final Judgment that broke the U.S. telephone monopoly, Mr. Shapiro was retained by AT&T to resolve a myriad of antitrust actions spawned in part by his earlier representation of plaintiffs. For the next eleven years he served as settlement counsel for AT&T and its offspring, the Regional Bell Operating Companies, as well as numerous other major corporations.

Other Law-Related Experience
Mr Shapiro was lead trial counsel in many landmark U.S. cases from 1950 to the early 1980's, and successfully argued appeals of such cases in various appellate courts in the United States. Before he was 35 he had won five cases in the Supreme Court of the United States and in 1972 was credited with having invented the concepts of "fluid class recovery", the consumer class action, and the parens patriae action in U.S. antitrust litigation. Mr Shapiro has written articles about mediation and current affairs in a number of publications.

Contact address
Quadrant Chambers
10 Fleet Street
London EC4Y 1AU
T +44 (0)20 7822 1462
F +44 (0)20 7583 4455
 
Referees
References available upon request