Bio
Daniel Riviera, principal of Riviera Law and Mediation, is an award-winning lawyer-mediator of wide experience and exceptional talent and skill.
Daniel was a transactional lawyer, with occasional involvement in litigation, first in Los Angeles and then in San Francisco, for over 30 years. His emphasis as a transactional lawyer was intellectual property, entertainment, licensing, technology, new ventures, and business. His clients included world-famous companies and individuals.
Following the conclusion of an arbitration in which Daniel represented one of the parties, the organization conducting the arbitration approached Daniel to become a mediator. Daniel underwent training, became deeply engaged with the role of the mediator and the process of consensual dispute resolution, and has been mediating intensively ever since. In the past 10 years, he has guided more than 1,000 conflicts to resolution.
From the outset of his dispute-resolution career, Daniel has worked extensively in family law, drawn by the blend of legal, financial, and emotional elements and the range of consensual dispute-resolution processes employed in the field.
Because of the plainly damaging effects of protracted litigation on a divorcing couple and their children, the need for alternative consensual (where the couples reach agreement themselves) methods of settling divorces out of court, particularly those that address the multiple facets of marital conflict, prompted the development of new dispute-resolution models or formats. Family law became, and still is, an innovative area of dispute resolution.
Beginning in 2012, Daniel refocused his practice to emphasize consensual dispute resolution, primarily in family law. He also mediates in the areas of business, employment, intellectual property, and entertainment.
Daniel’s real-world expertise, acquired over many years in Los Angeles and San Francisco, in entity structure and financing, operational, control, and succession issues, and employment and equity or other forms of contingent compensation arrangements, makes him particularly well-suited to complex, high-value dissolutions involving these kinds of assets.
Daniel's decades of negotiating agreements – of listening; of identifying and articulating the interests of his clients; of assessing strengths and weaknesses; of clear and frank discussion; of finding common ground; of structuring, fully developing, and precisely drafting agreements; of focus and efficiency; and of a fundamental orientation toward making not breaking deals – provide an ideal background to his work in dispute resolution.
Daniel is a frequent settlement conference panelist in the Family Law Department of Marin County Superior Court. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Collaborative Practice North Bay, Integrative Mediation Bay Area (“IMBA”), and the prestigious association of professional mediators, The Mediation Society. He currently serves as the President of IMBA. He is a member of the Marin County Bar Association and the Beverly Hills Bar Association.
In 2017, Daniel received a Pro Bono Award for his work in mediation from the Sonoma County Bar Association.
Daniel is a graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center.