ROBERT KIRKMAN COLLINS will mark his 40th anniversary as a divorce mediator next year, and during the course of his long career Bob has guided well over a thousand couples through the difficult passage of divorce. Trained in 1982 in the first group in New York taught by John Haynes, the creator of divorce mediation, Bob was one of the founders, an original Board Member, and a past President of the Family and Divorce Mediation Council of Greater New York. He has has been cited by Cardozo Law School as being “among the pioneers of divorce mediation in New York”.
Formerly a partner in the law firm of Davidson, Dawson and Clark and then an independent family law practitioner in Manhattan for twenty years, Bob is now a Professor of Practice and is the Founder and Director of the Divorce Mediation Clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. At Cardozo, he teaches divorce mediation and supervises law students who conduct mediations at the Clinic with couples referred by New York State’s Office of Court Administration and Community Dispute Resolution Centers from across New York State.
Bob has been teaching divorce mediation for over 25 years, and has trained many of the mediators currently practicing in New York State, using his manual Common Sense and the Crisis of Divorce. A founding member of The New York Mediation Group, he has taught at the Ackerman Institute for the Family, has trained divorce mediators for The New York Peace Institute (formally Safe Horizons), and for twenty years has taught Family Mediation at the Northwest Institute for Dispute Resolution in Idaho. During the course of his career, Bob has trained mediators in states across the country, and lectured on mediation in England, South America and Asia. Bob has also taught Family Law at Cardozo, and at Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey.
Bob graduated with Honors from Yale College, and was on Law Review at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.