Experience You Can Trust

Stephen A. Brunette is an Attorney Mediator with over 40 years of combined experience in the practice of law, alternative dispute resolution, and legal publishing.  He has devoted the past several years to representing clients in simple and complex litigation involving estates of various sizes, representing estate administrators, heirs, devisees, protected persons, and other persons who have interests in an estate.  

Approach to Mediation 

He has also completed extensive training in various approaches to Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), including Negotiation, Facilitative Mediation, Evaluative Mediation, and Arbitration over the course of more than 25 years.  Services of Legacy Mediation focus on the use of mediation to help families resolve complex issues that may arise in estate and probate matters, but do not include arbitration, in which an arbitrator would produce a binding ruling on matters of fact and law.  

In the event the parties reach an apparently insurmountable impasse following Facilitative Mediation, the scope of the mediation may be expanded at the direction of the parties, to an Evaluative Mediation, in which the mediator would evaluate the parties positions and interests and provide a non-binding  perspective that the parties and counsel may consider in moving toward resolution of the  impasse.

 Ongoing Education and Training in Dispute Resolution

• Online Probate & Elder Mediation,  American College of Trust & Estate Counsel (ACTEC) and Mediate.com (10 hour training emphasizing strengths & weakness of using online services & resources (e.g., Zoom) in probate and estate mediations, completed 2024)

• Mediation Primer: Growing Your Probate & Elder Mediation Practice, American College of Trust & Estate Counsel (ACTEC) and Mediate.com (10 hour training emphasizing issues unique to probate and estate mediations, completed 2024) 

• Fundamentals of Mediation (40 hour training for Basic Certification as Mediator), Anne Michelle McKenna, McKenna, Inc. (2011)  

• Construction Industry Arbitrator Training, American Arbitration Association (1997)  

• Mediation Skills and Settlement Conference Advocacy: The Art of Facilitating Settlement, Institute for Dispute Resolution, Pepperdine University School of Law (1996)

• Arbitration Case Preparation and Presentation, American Arbitration Association (1996)