Member Bio
Sid Kanazawa is a mediator, arbitrator, trial lawyer, and bridge builder who brings people together even when it seems impossible.
For over 40 years, he represented plaintiffs and defendants, locally, nationally, and internationally, in jury and non-jury trials, arbitrations, administrative proceedings, crises, mediations, and negotiations. Subject matters included employment, class actions, product liability, environmental pollution, admiralty, real estate, entertainment, manufacturing, construction defects, landslides, earthquakes, hurricanes, intellectual property, FDA, education, anti-trust, Ponzi schemes, sports medicine, personal injury, government investigations, complex business disputes, and more.
Sid builds bridges to take parties from anger and distrust to curiosity and hope. In the largest oil spill in the Port of Los Angeles, Sid quelled an angry mob and settled 600 claims within two weeks of the spill and all 2,000+ within three months. For plaintiffs and defendants, he has resolved multi-million matters over lunch and wrote about it in a 2004 article entitled, “Apologies and Lunch” which has been republished multiple times. Recently, at the Edelman Children’s Court, he has engaged parents negotiating their parenting time and has converted their long-standing hate, anger, and distrust into solid agreements in nearly 100% of the mediations he has handled.
Sid’s mediation and negotiation training includes the Harvard Program on Negotiation, the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution (Pepperdine Law School), the Southern California Family Mediation Program (Edelman Children’s Court), the Asian Pacific American Dispute Resolution Center, the Los Angeles County Bar Association (Los Angeles Superior Court), FINRA, the Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs Mediation Program (Stanley Mosk Superior Court), the Dan Simon Transformative Mediation Program, and the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California Mediation Panel.
Sid also served for 10 years as the General Counsel for the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) and has served in leadership roles for various bar organizations, including the California Bar, ABA, ALI, DRI, JABA, NITA, MLA, LCA and PLAC.
Sid is a graduate of the University of Hawaii (B.Ed.) and the University of Southern California Gould School of Law (J.D.) and is admitted to practice law in California and Hawaii. He previously worked as a teacher, outreach counselor, and body-fender mechanic.