Robert Fries

As a partner in Carter, Carter, Fries & Grunschlag, Bob Fries represents small businesses, non-profits, and individuals in a wide variety of matters, teaches negotiation, and serves as an impartial neutral. 

Legal Experience:

Counsel and litigation in business disputes (contracts, fraud, unfair business practices, trade secrets), real estate, personal injury, and employment (discrimination and harassment (race, gender, sex, disability), FMLA, wage/hour, civil rights, ADA, ADEA, class-action, and NLRA cases. Bob has tried cases to verdict in several Bay Area counties and federal courts, and has briefed and argued appeals in the First and Third District Courts of Appeal and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. 

Experience as a Neutral:

Bob has successfully mediated disputes for private parties and Bay Area courts involving discrimination (race, sex, and age), ADA (access and employment), wage/hour, wrongful discharge, trade secret, police practices, real estate (development, construction, landlord-tenant), trusts, probate, business, personal injury, elder abuse, attorneys’ fees, and class action cases.  His mediation training includes over 400 hours in facilitative, evaluative, and cross-cultural mediation with The Center for Mediation in Law, Stanford Law School, the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution at UC Hastings College of the Law, and the Strauss Institute at Pepperdine Law School. 

Arbitration participants have praised Bob’s ability to “assist all parties in seeing things in a clear and realistic light,” his “insight and grasp of the psychological aspects of mediation,” and have described him as “well prepared, fair, reasonable, and persuasive.”  Bob’s mediation video can be found at:   https://vimeo.com/70974321