Resume

Claudia Hagadus Long, Esq. is one of the leading alternative dispute resolution neutrals in the Bay Area. She specializes in resolving disputes involving:

• Business: Ms. Long has helped craft equitable partnership dissolutions, and mediated inter-business disputes, large collection matters, sensitive issues of management relations, all with an eye to prompt and satisfactory results.

• Construction: As one of the early construction-defect litigators, Ms. Long has experience mediating disputes between owners and contractors, contractors and subcontractors, mechanic’s liens, and insurance issues surrounding construction claims.

• Employment: Central to Ms. Long’s mediation practice is the humane, culturally informed and economical resolution of employer-employee disputes, including Civil Rights claims, discrimination claims involving race, national origin and language, gender, gender identification, sexual orientation, age and disability issues; ADA claims, leave/FMLA/CIFRA matters, and wrongful termination. She mediated or supervised the mediation of over 500 disputes with the State of California Department of Fair Employment & Housing.

• Probate, Trusts & Estates: In an area requiring both compassion and intense practicality, Ms. Long has a long-established mediation practice resolving the disputes between family members as heirs, claims of elder abuse, and claims of outsiders, all handled with an understanding of the needs of the parties.

• Real Estate & Banking: In one of the most common arenas of mediation, Ms. Long has extensive experience with the claims of buyers, sellers and agents in the resolution of both mandatory pre-litigation concerns and mid-lawsuit solutions. She has long and vast experience with banks and other lending institutions regarding mortgage claims, claims of wrongful foreclosure, illegal lending practices, and holdover evictions.

• Wage & Hour: This is a popular topic for mediation, and Ms. Long has mediated overtime, rest and meal breaks as well as independent-contractor/employee claims to satisfactory conclusion.

• Indian/Native American Tribal Council Disputes: Although not a member of any Tribe or council, Ms. Long has successfully mediated between Tribe and non-Tribe parties regarding leases, casinos, and territorial infringements, with both classic mediation modes and collaborative decision-making.

Ms. Long has been a practicing attorney for 40 years, both as an exceptionally skilled mediator who has mediated over 2,500 cases, and as a civil litigator in both large and small law firms and in-house counsel at a large multinational bank.

Fluent in Spanish and French, she can conduct mediations entirely in Spanish when necessary. She is trusted to resolve complex disputes with multifaceted and multidisciplinary legal, organizational, cultural and personal issues.

Ms. Long is also a well-known novelist, with five novels, including the most recent, Nine Tenths of the Law, to her credit.

• B.A. Harvard University, magna cum laude, 1976
• J.D. Georgetown University Law Center, 1980

• 1997 – 2014 Long Law Offices, of counsel mediator and arbitrator
  Mediated over 1,300 cases. Also served as Arbitrator, Special Master and Insurance Umpire.
• 2010 – 2020 Department of Fair Employment & Housing, Mediator
  Mediated Employment Discrimination cases through DFEH; assisted Director of Dispute Resolution with administrative and policy issues; managed volunteer mediator program.
• 1991 – 1997 Law Offices of Claudia Hagadus Long, Litigation
  Litigated Construction, Real Estate, Banking and Commercial Disputes
• 1987 – 1991 Hyde & Drath, Litigation
  Litigated and tried Construction, Real Estate and Business cases
• 1981 – 1987 Bank of America, Legal Department Litigation Section
  Litigated and tried Banking disputes

• California Association of Distinguished Neutrals
• Contra Costa Bar Association
• State Bar of California
• SMART Mediation Panel, Contra Costa Superior Court