Mr. Helm has mediated disputes up to ten figures in a wide range of areas, including securities class actions, disputes arising from corporate transactions, regulatory enforcement actions, claims against accounting firms, administration of billion-dollar trusts, copyright and trademark actions, and many others. He is a panelist on the American Arbitration Association national roster of arbitrators and is a member of the court-appointed four-mediator panel to resolve larger-stakes securities claims in the Pacific Gas & Electric bankruptcy. He has studied mediation at the Straus Institute and was previously a member of the ADR panel for the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

Before joining Phillips ADR, Mr. Helm was a nationally-recognized trial lawyer and appellate advocate at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP in Los Angeles. He specialized in complex disputes involving asset management firms and their portfolio companies; entertainment and intellectual property; trade secrets and employee mobility; claims against law firms; and the duties of directors, officers, and shareholders. His wide-ranging practice over the years also included antitrust, mass torts, environmental law, insurance, and investigations, and he once served as outside general counsel for a public company. From 2005 to 2010, Mr. Helm was co-managing partner of the firm, and he was named in 2008 as one of Lawdragon’s “100 Managing Partners You Need to Know.”

Mr. Helm is the immediate past chair of the board of directors of the YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles and is president of the board of directors of the Ojai Playwrights Conference. He is a former co-chair of the ABA Litigation Section’s Committee on Pro Bono and Public Service, a former chair of the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s Professional Responsibility and Ethics Committee, and a former adjunct professor at Loyola Law School. Active for many years in efforts to diversify the legal profession, he was on the team of lawyers who developed the “Mansfield Rule” for the Stanford Law School Women in Law Hackathon in 2016. More recently, he served as an NGO observer of terrorism prosecutions before the Military Commission at Guantanamo Bay on behalf of the Pacific Council on International Policy, of which he is a member.

Mr. Helm clerked for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger on the United States Supreme Court and Judge Carl McGowan on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Before attending law school, Mr. Helm worked for a year as the political speechwriter for Mayor Kevin H. White of Boston.

Mr. Helm graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was President of the Harvard Law Review and received the Sears Prize. He graduated from Harvard College magna cum laude in government, where he received the Wendell Phillips Award for oratory, the Detur Book Prize, and the John Harvard Scholarship.

A lover of jazz and blues music, Mr. Helm has regularly attended the New Orleans Jazz Festival for over a quarter century, and he plays jazz piano with more enthusiasm than ability. He has grown twin daughters, one an actor and television writer in Los Angeles and the other a fiction writer and podcast host in Brooklyn. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Cathy, also a lawyer, and their two dogs.

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