Bruce A. Clemens

Bruce A. Clemens serves as a full-time mediation neutral exclusively at ARC (Alternative Resolutions Centers). He also co-founded the Beverly Hills, California family law firm of Jaffe and Clemens in 1977 and served as managing partner for 42 years.

A Certified Specialist in Family Law since the program was founded in California in 1980, Mr. Clemens has handled more than 700 complex marital dissolutions with an aggregate net worth in excess of $35 billion. He settled 95% of his cases and was a first chair trial attorney in the 5% of his cases that did not settle.

Mr. Clemens has been consistently recognized by national publications as one of the best family law attorneys in California. He has taught more than 40 family law courses and is a prolific lecturer, author, and panelist on family law topics, including for the AAML for more than 20 years, most recently in January 2021.

Mr. Clemens uses a unique, multi–disciplinary approach in dispute resolution. This is based on his formal training in family law dispute resolution including the AAML Matrimonial Mediation program in Texas in 1999, collaborative law, litigation techniques, negotiation forces and techniques, the inter-relationship between psychological issues and legal issues, and the inter-relationship between economic needs and non-economic needs in the same mediation. One of his specialties is a unique form of early-stage mediation (in the first 90 days of a litigated case) usually where both parties are represented.

Prior to attending law school, Mr. Clemens was a computer systems analyst at the Goddard Space Flight Center for the Apollo 8/11 First Man on the Moon project.