Carter Hired to Teach Mediation Clinic

 

Press contact:

James O’Neill 212-854-1584 Cell: 646-596-2935

 

April 23, 2008 (NEW YORK) - Alexandra Carter, an associate attorney with Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP and a mediator, will join Columbia Law School July 1 as an Associate Clinical Professor in the Law School’s Mediation Clinic.

 

Carter has been at Cravath, Swaine & Moore since 2004, where she has served on a team defending against a multi-billion dollar securities class-action lawsuit related to Enron Corporation. She has also served as the senior antitrust associate on several multi-billion dollar mergers and worked on cases involving copyright law.

 

Carter, who won the Jane Marks Murphy Prize for clinical advocacy while a student at Columbia Law School, has become a strong advocate of mediation as a valuable solution for many kinds of legal challenges.

 

“As someone who has both mediated cases and represented clients in mediation, I have come to understand that mediation is a powerful conflict resolution tool, one that more and more lawyers will encounter over the course of their careers,” Carter said. “I hope to help students understand how and when mediation can be used to solve conflicts – whether they decide to become mediators or end up representing clients in mediation.

 

“I also hope to show our students how the skills they learn in the Mediation Clinic can help them become better lawyers, even in the adversarial practice of litigation,” she said.

 

Through Safe Horizon, a New York-based non-profit that specializes in mediation, Carter has served as an approved mediator. She has also supervised student mediations in court-related programs at New York City Civil Court and Harlem Small Claims Court.

 

Carter joins three other new hires announced this spring: Theodore M. Shaw, director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; Jamal Greene, a constitutional law expert and former journalist; and Trevor Morrison, an expert on separation of powers, federalism and executive branch legal interpretation.

 

These four new faculty join seven hired last year, bringing to 11 the number who have been added in little over a year. This expansion is part of Dean David Schizer’s effort to broaden course offerings, reduce class size and further improve opportunities for mentorship between faculty and students.

 

Carter majored in English and minored in Mandarin Chinese as an undergraduate at Georgetown University, graduating in 1997. Initially Carter planned to study French, but she switched to Chinese, she said, “because it seemed like a unique challenge and China was growing into an important player on the world stage.”

 

After Georgetown, she spent 1997-98 in Taiwan on a Fulbright Scholarship, where she researched Taiwan’s contemporary literature to assess the political tensions at the time between those who wanted the island to assert independence and those who favored reunification with the People’s Republic of China.

 

Next she landed a job as a private equity analyst with Goldman Sachs, where she performed quantitative analysis of potential opportunities as well as fund performance. Carter also found herself working with the company’s internal legal counsel on legal documents for a new fund. “I realized I liked the legal side of my private equity work more than the financial analysis,” she said.

 

She enrolled at Columbia Law School, was accepted as a student in the Mediation Clinic, and then later worked as a teaching assistant in the clinic under Professor Carol B. Liebman. Carter also was articles editor for the Journal of Transnational Law.

 

While at Columbia Law School Carter also won the Lawrence S. Greenbaum Prize for best oral argument in the 2002 Harlan Fiske Stone Moot Court Competition. She also met her husband at Columbia, Greg T. Lembrich ’03, now an associate at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP. The couple lives in Maplewood, N.J.

 

Carter earned her J.D. in 2003, then clerked for the Hon. Mark L. Wolf of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Boston before joining Cravath, Swaine & Moore. She has kept up her Mandarin Chinese, and has used it in her practice.

 

Her hobbies include classical piano, singing, sushi eating and watching college football.

 

In the Mediation Clinic, students learn about conflict resolution and provide service to those in conflict while mediating cases in both court and community settings. It is one of eight clinics at Columbia Law School.

 

Columbia Law School, founded in 1858, stands at the forefront of legal education and of the law in a global society. Columbia Law School joins traditional strengths in international and comparative law, constitutional law, administrative law, business law and human rights law with pioneering work in the areas of intellectual property, digital technology, sexuality and gender, and criminal law.