Bill Stempel’s long career as a lawyer, mediator, and arbitrator has centered on clarifying options, solving problems, and getting things done in a variety of large and small organizations and in many areas of law and business, including health care, life sciences, intellectual property licensing, and employment matters.
Bill Stempel graduated summa cum laude from Yale College in 1975 and from Yale Law School in 1978. After three years at the New York law firm of Debevoise, Plimpton, Lyons & Gates (now Debevoise & Plimpton), he moved to New Haven, Connecticut to join the Office of the General Counsel at Yale University in 1981. He worked at Yale until 1998, including 11 years as Deputy General Counsel of the University, on everything from intellectual property to real estate to employment matters to student grievances. From 1998 to 2000 he was General Counsel at UCSF Stanford Health Care in San Francisco, a large nonprofit health care provider organization that operated four hospitals and several thousand physician practices. From 2001 to 2004, he was Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of Geron Corporation, a publicly-traded biopharmaceutical company in Menlo Park, California that is developing therapeutics for cancer and other diseases. From 2005 to 2007 he practiced law and mediation in Palo Alto, California, and in August of 2007 moved his practice to Connecticut.
His mediation training includes programs at Harvard Law School, the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine University, the U.S. Postal Service REDRESS mediation program, the San Francisco Bar Association, and the American Health Lawyers Association. His arbitration training includes programs at the American Dispute Resolution Center and FINRA. He was President of the Board of Directors of Community Mediation, Inc. in New Haven from 2008 to 2016, and Co-Editor of ACResolution Magazine, the quarterly magazine of the Association for Conflict Resolution, from 2011 to 2016.