Barbara Byrd Wecker, a retired Judge of the New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Division, has served as a private mediator and arbitrator since her retirement from the bench in late 2006. Her experience and skills in both mediation and arbitration are called upon frequently to resolve employment related,professional partnership, professional negligence and healthcare issues, as well as complex commercial disputes.
Her experience in employment cases includes discrimination,hostile workplace and whistleblower claims, along with unfair competition and restrictive covenant issues. She has served both as a sole arbitrator and as a member of a three-arbitrator panel in many commercial disputes and professional partnership breakups.
Ms. Wecker is Of Counsel to the law firm of Greenberg Dauber Epstein & Tucker, PC, with offices in Newark, where she chairs the Alternate Dispute Resolution Department. She is a Certified Mediator in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey and a New Jersey court-approved mediator under Rule 1:40.
During more than ten years on the trial court in Union County, and ten additional years on the Appellate Division, Ms. Wecker handled a broad variety of commercial, employment-related, professional negligence,insurance coverage and family matters, as well as administrative appeals and criminal cases, and published more than 100 of the over 1,000 opinions she wrote.
Ms. Wecker is a member of the Marie L. Garibaldi American Inn of Court for Alternate Dispute Resolution, the Sections on Dispute Resolution of the American and New Jersey State Bar Associations (and a member of the Board of the New Jersey Section) and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She is the author of a chapter, “Avoiding Impasse: A Mediator’s Rules to Live By,” in DEFINITIVE CREATIVE IMPASSE-BREAKING TECHNIQUES IN MEDIATION (Ed. Molly Klapper, published 2011, New York State Bar
Association).
She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Cornell University and an Honors graduate of Rutgers Law School (Newark), where she was a member of the Editorial Board of the Law Review. She has a Masters degree in Counseling from the University of Missouri and a Master of Laws from the University of Virginia School of Law.