Brian J. Purtill has conducted arbitrations and mediations at Arbitration & Mediation Center in Santa Rosa since 1996. For the past thirty years, he has been a litigator in Northern California, but is now closing out that phase of his career to work full time as an Alternative Dispute Resolution neutral.
Mr. Purtill has tried and/or litigated cases in virtually all counties from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Oregon border. He has also appeared in both the U.S. Federal District Court and the California Court of Appeal in San Francisco. He began his legal career in Sonoma County in 1984 after graduating that same year from the University of San Francisco Law School, and handled primarily insurance defense litigation for the first eleven years of his practice. This included, among others, personal injury, insurance coverage, real estate fraud, premises liability, product defect, and construction defect litigation. His practice expanded in 1995 with the formation of a new partnership, Purtill & Bryan, where he added construction law, land use, and other business and personal disputes of various types, representing both plaintiffs and defendants, and where he developed a business consultation practice, primarily for contractors and owners in construction projects. In 2004, he became Of Counsel to the Santa Rosa law firm of Spaulding McCullough & Tansil LLP, and maintained his litigation and business consulting practice there for ten years until July 31, 2014, when he left the firm to devote himself full time to his ADR practice.
Since August 15, 2018, he has been the Dean at Empire College School of Law in Santa Rosa, California, and now splits his time between those duties and his mediation practice.
Litigation Experience (not all inclusive): Personal injury; property damage; real estate fraud; mechanics’ lien and construction law; first party insurance coverage disputes; complex multi-party construction defect; boundary and other neighbor disputes; commercial and personal unlawful detainers; breach of warranty of habitability cases; corporate and partnership dissolution; trust and estates litigation; breach of contract.
Mediation/Arbitration Experience (not all inclusive): Personal injury (auto/premises liability); trusts and estates claims; real estate sales disputes; partnership dissolution; business disputes; breach of construction contract; commercial and residential landlord/tenant disputes; homeowner association claims; boundary and other neighbor disputes.
Primary ADR Trainings (not all inclusive):
1996 Mediation Fundamentals: Gary Friedman (40 hours)
1999 Business Mediation: Ron Kelly, UC Berkeley Extension campus (40 hours)
2010 The Mastery of Collaborative Practice: Collaborative Practice Ctr. (16 hours)
2011 Fundamentals of Elder Mediation: Sonoma State University (16 hours)
2013 Impasse is a Fallacy: American Institute of Mediation (10 hours)
Recent Substantive Law Trainings:
2014 Family Law Boot Camp, Garret C. Dailey, Esq. (13 hours)
2014 Special Custody Issues as Minor’s Counsel; SCBA (8 hours)