Christine Masters has dedicated her entire legal career to resolving all types of employment disputes, including harassment and discrimination matters, retaliation, wage-hour issues (individual and class actions), and other employment disputes arising in both public and private settings.
Ms. Masters was a practicing attorney specializing in employment rights issues, first at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, handling cases under the ADEA, the EPA, and early sexual harassment cases under Title VII. Later, in private practice at the firm of Allred, Maroko, Goldberg & Ribakoff, and at her own firm of Masters & Ribakoff, she continued her advocacy practice on behalf of individual employees and small employers, gaining a reputation as a strong but reasonable advocate, obtaining good results for her clients in litigation and in voluntary settlement conferences.
Ms. Masters’ interest in Alternative Dispute Resolution was piqued in the mid-1990s when she was asked to mediate a sales commission dispute. Soon thereafter, she was asked to conduct an independent investigation of sexual harassment allegations in an all-female workplace. A year later, she was asked to join the American Arbitration Association, and her neutral practice was launched. By 1997, Ms. Masters had established herself as an independent, knowledgeable, and effective mediator, arbitrator, and investigator/factfinder who was sought out to handle the most difficult and challenging disputes, and she began working full-time as a neutral.
Her extensive background in employment law, coupled with her continuing training in alternative dispute resolution, enables her to readily connect with parties and counsel and assist them in making informed choices about whether to resolve a matter informally or proceed to litigation based on their specific interests and needs. She is known for her thorough preparation, quick ability to understand the facts, legal arguments, and the parties’ goals in any given dispute, and her patient and perseverant nature.
Christine Masters,
Mediator & Arbitrator
Christine Masters Professional Biography
Never Say Never, Daily Journal, February 25, 2022
Frank-Talking Mediator Aims for Transformation, Daily Journal, November 3, 2006
My Story“After three decades as a mediator, I've learned that the hardest part of resolving a conflict is rarely the facts. It's letting go of the need to be right.”
I think often of the poet Mary Oliver, who wrote about giving up the exhausting effort to save the world through argument, and choosing instead to simply get on with living. That's what good mediation offers: not a verdict on who was right, but a way forward.
Over the last ten years, I can count on one hand the number of cases I've mediated that didn't resolve. Every other case settled — the parties walked away with an outcome they'd shaped themselves, instead of one imposed on them after months or years of expensive litigation. The handful that didn't settle went to trial, and in every one of them, at least one side left far worse off than they would have at the table.
That's not a coincidence. It's what thirty years of doing this teaches you: how to help people stop defending a position long enough to solve a problem.