Michele Riley

Michele S. Riley is an independent arbitrator and mediator with over 35 years of international legal experience across a wide range of corporate and commercial transactions having worked both in private practice at law firms in New York and Tokyo and as general counsel of a US-based subsidiary of a Fortune Global 500 company.

Michele’s areas of expertise include ADR (arbitration, mediation and negotiation), commercial transactions, finance, cross-border transactions, including joint ventures and mergers & acquisitions, distribution/franchising, consulting arrangements, technology transfer and licensing, procurement, corporate governance and conflict management systems in the workplace.

Michele is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (CIArb) and serves as an ADR Neutral for the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution (CPR), the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR), the American Arbitration Association (AAA), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), and several federal and state court-annexed mediation programs in New York, including the Pro Bono Appellate Mediator Panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Complementing her ADR practice, Michele teaches mediation and negotiation at Columbia University’s Morton Deutsch - International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution and in its Master’s Degree Program in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution.

Michele is currently active in promoting the use of ADR in her roles as a member of the CIArb Examinations Board and as a tutor for the CIArb Accelerated Route to Fellowship program. As a volunteer for the International Legal Institute — African Center for Legal Excellence, Michele has provided training in international commercial arbitration to state counsel from the Attorney General’s Chambers, Botswana annually in 2015-17 and 2019, and administrators of the Nairobi Centre for International Arbitration, Kenya in 2018. Under the auspices of the International Senior Lawyers Project, she also assisted an NGO, in partnership with the University of Lagos, in developing a Master’s degree program in negotiation and conflict resolution at a newly-established College of Negotiation in 2014.

Michele holds an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. Her academic credentials also include a professional certificate in Conflict and Dispute Resolution from the Center for Finance, Law and Taxation at New York University.