For further information regarding our team of neutrals, call Meghan Lettington at 949-760-5280, or email MLettington@phillipsadr.com
Area of expertise:
Mr. Helm has mediated disputes up to ten figures in a wide range of areas, including securities and consumer class actions, shareholder derivative actions, disputes arising from domestic and international corporate transactions, mass torts, claims against accounting firms and law firms, complex land use disputes, allegations of sexual misconduct, ERISA claims, talent management contracts, administration of billion-dollar trusts, regulatory enforcement actions, copyright and trademark actions, and many others. He 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.
Mr. Helm is a panelist on the American Arbitration Association national roster of arbitrators and is a member of the advisory board of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration. He has served as an arbitrator in a range of business disputes, including cases alleging interference with acquisitions, violation of stock purchase agreements, redemptions under LLC agreements, and others. He also has served as arbitrator in a range of consumer disputes, including automobile defects, cryptocurrency, non-disparagement clauses, financing practices, health studio services contracts, new automobile technologies, and others.
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 a member of the Claremont Colleges board of directors and of the board of directors of the Ojai Playwrights Conference, where he served for three years as board president. He previously served for four years as chair of the board of directors of the YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles. 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.
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 magna cum laude in government from Harvard College, 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 who works at a literary and talent agency in Los Angeles and the other who is a fiction writer and podcast host in Brooklyn. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Cathy, also a lawyer.
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