Giuseppe De Palo, Founder and President of the Dialogue Foundation, has been a full-time practitioner, professor, and advocate of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) for almost three decades. In the global dispute resolution community, he is well-known for his never-ending energy, innovative ideas, and ability to make things happen.
In 1998, he developed the vision for, and co-founded, ADR Center, one of the largest private mediation services providers in Europe, where he was for seventeen years the Chairman of the Board and now remains as a shareholder. During his career as a mediator, Giuseppe has contributed to the resolution of over 2,500 disputes, mediating cases in more than 60 countries and dealing with parties of over 90 different nationalities.
Giuseppe’s academic career started in 1995, and he is now the International Professor of Alternative Dispute Resolution Law and Practice at Mitchell Hamline School of Law (U.S.A.). In that time, he has authored and edited publications translated into over twenty languages.
In his role as an advocate for ADR, between 2004 and 2015 Giuseppe served some of the world’s largest international donor organizations as project director of several multi-million Euro projects, covering over 40 countries, to promote the knowledge and use of mediation and arbitration. He has also provided expert advice and been the lead author of research studies addressing the use of ADR commissioned by national and supranational parliaments. He has been a personal advisor on dispute resolution policy to Ministers of Justice and of Economics in several countries.
Between 2015 and 2022, Giuseppe served as the Ombudsman for the United Nations Funds and Programmes (UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, UNOPS, and UN-Women) Office. During his mandate, he led five UN agencies to sign a formal pledge committing to mediation of their workplace disputes and established the first UN Global Mediation Panel, making mediators easily available to UN offices globally.
Giuseppe currently advises on how to incorporate ADR into the ESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) strategies of large private and public organizations. He also specializes in mediating disputes most people would deem intractable.
