Mark Baer

Mark B. Baer attended law school because of his personal experiences as a child of his parents’ very contentious litigated divorce and what he saw as the misuse of the legal system by people seeking emotional justice. As a result of those experiences, when he started practicing law over twenty-five years ago, he steered away from heavily emotional areas of law. Ironically, a few years later, he found himself practicing in the field of family law, a field he had deliberately avoided because he didn’t want to assist parents in unintentionally harming their children by escalating the level of parental conflict by fighting against each other. For a while, he believed that he could practice within the adversarial system and help children by doing so in a psychologically-minded and child-centered manner in spite of the approach taken by the opposing side. Once he realized otherwise, he learned about mediation, received extensive mediation training, focused his practice on mediation and began publishing prolifically on the interplay between psychology and conflict resolution within the field of family law, as well as familial and interpersonal relationships in general. His articles have been referenced in books, law review articles, and by non-political evidenced-based public policy think tanks.