Leonardo D’Urso is a full-time mediator, co-founder and CEO of ADR Center, Adjunct Professor at Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine University (Malibu-CA, USA) and member of the Board of Director of the Weinstein International Foundation – Mediating a Better Future. With more than 23 years’ experience in the field of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), he has mediated over 2.000 complex civil and commercial mediations, workplace disputes and facilitated various public dialogue processes. In the field of consulting, his current focus is developing ADR strategic policies for Governments, Ministries of Justice and large organizations and drafting effective legislative frameworks to increase the recourse to mediation and the quality of mediation services. From 2017 to 2019, he has been Scientific Expert of the Working Group on Mediation of CEPEJ at the Council of Europe and currently is in the panel of selected CEPEJ Experts on mediation.

He has been appointed as mediator for a high-level workplace management dispute within European public institutions by the IPAM Independent Project Accountability Mechanism (IPAM) of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) as Impartial and Independent Expert.

Since 1998, he has been nominated as senior expert in several international projects on ADR in Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe. In particular, he has been one of the leading experts in the two-year successful project for the creation of the first mediation center for commercial dispute in Kabul, Afghanistan. The most recent projects aimed to draft mediation legislative reforms and implement capacity building in Azerbaijan, Moldova, Serbia, Oman, Jamaica, Jordan, Turkey and Zambia based on the “Italian Mediation Model”.

Author of several publications on negotiation and mediation, Leonardo has lectured on Negotiation and Mediation Techniques at several universities, Chambers of Commerce, and conducted hundrends of trainings courses for multinational corporations in the last 23 years. With ADR Center, he is the co-organizer of the Italian editions of the workshop “Negotiation for Executives” of the Program on Negotiation (PON Global) at Harvard Law School.

Mr. D’Urso complies with the minimum requirements included in the tender specifications document: academic diploma, English C2 CEFR level, 24 years of mediation practice, at least 15 years post education experience with designing and delivering mediation training programs, at least ten relevant mediation training projects designed and delivered in the last four years.