BRIGITTE BELL, JD, a mediator and lawyer for over 30 years, began her legal career as a litigator at Jenner & Block, moving to McDermott Will & Emery in 1985 when she began to practice family law. She has been a mediation teacher, trainer, and long-term Board member at the Center for Conflict Resolution and a teacher of conflict resolution skills at Loyola Law School and DePaul’s School for New Learning. She speaks nationally and locally about mediation and family law (parenting, financial, ethical, & policy/process issues). She has co-taught the Advanced Mediation Internship at Chicago Center for Family Health (University of Chicago). As a founding member of Collaborative Divorce Illinois, she was its first Co-President and she served for years as chair of the Excellence and Best Practices Committee; she remains a Fellow. She is active in numerous local and national organizations that focus their energies on mediation, conflict resolution, and family law and children’s issues, including AFCC, ACR, IACP, and the ABA Section on Dispute Resolution. She has consistently been elected to Best Lawyers in America as a Collaborative professional, to Leading Lawyers both as a Family Lawyer and a Neutral, and is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Brigitte strongly supports non-adversarial approaches to divorce/family issues and practices in ways that foster respect, self-determination and constructive resolutions.