About John
John Ford studied at the University of Cape Town, where he earned a B.A. in 1984 and an LL.B. in 1987. He built a career that crosses law, mediation and education. His academic training in Cape Town set a foundation for work that would later span classrooms, court-adjacent practice and online publishing.
He began practicing soon after his graduation and by 1988 was a partner at Lorentz and Bone. That early period in private practice gave way to broader interests. In 1997 he launched a personal website, www.johnford.com, and in 2000 he became managing editor at Mediate.com, a role that placed him at the center of online conversation about dispute resolution. Over the next decade his work moved between institutions and practice. He joined John F. Kennedy University in 2007 as Organizational Psychology Coordinator, and in 2009 he was on the faculty of the Werner Institute for Dispute Resolution and Negotiation.
The 2010s deepened his role as a mediator and teacher. In 2010 he served as senior mediator for Liaise Divorce Solutions and taught as adjunct faculty at Golden Gate University. He later took an adjunct professorship at U.C. Berkeley in 2014 and that same year founded The HR Mediation Academy, a program aimed at training mediators to handle workplace disputes. He has also worked on media projects. In 2019 he is credited as a producer on The Empathy Set, a project that aligns with themes common to his teaching and practice.
His work sits at the intersection of dispute resolution, organizational psychology and legal education. He has moved fluently between practicing mediation in family and workplace contexts and training others to do the same. His roles as editor, educator and program founder reflect a practice that is part practitioner, part teacher. Colleagues and students have encountered him in university classrooms, at professional trainings and in online forums devoted to mediation.
Ford maintains an active profile that blends practice, publication and instruction. He continues to run his website and to direct the HR Mediation Academy while holding an office affiliation at UC Law San Francisco. He currently concentrates on workplace mediation, divorce mediation and mediator training.
