Hal Gessner

Hal Gessner is a certified mediator whose practice spans business and community disputes, employer–employee conflict, intellectual property, family mediation, including eldercare and trusts-and-estates matters, and media and entertainment disputes.

He serves on the Executive Board of the New York Peace Institute, where he also mentors and instructs in the advanced apprenticeship mediation program. He teaches conflict de-escalation in the NYPD's Neighborhood Coordination Officer training program and has served as a mediator in the Americans with Disabilities Act pilot program for the Southern District of New York.

Before mediation, Hal spent thirty-five years in network news and entertainment as a producer and executive producer for CBS and ABC. His work earned four national Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, and an Edward R. Murrow Award.

He keeps a line of Alexander Graham Bell's close at hand: we often look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.