Daniel Riviera is an award-winning attorney-mediator practicing primarily in the areas of family, business, employment, intellectual property, and entertainment. He has employed his superb analytical, organizational, and communication skills, sensitive and empathetic personality, natural leadership qualities, and strong service ethic to settle more than one thousand disputes. He is known for his incisive, focused style, and his ability to guide to resolution, for a wide range of parties, entrenched conflicts involving complex factual, legal, and emotional elements, and high financial and personal stakes.
A substantial portion of Mr. Riviera’s practice involves the resolution of family conflict, including divorce, legal separation, and dissolution of domestic partnership; and the negotiation of the many issues arising in such life transitions, including the division of property, child support, spousal support, and parenting. Mr. Riviera mediates the negotiation of premarital and postmarital agreements, and the modification of existing family law agreements.
Mr. Riviera also mediates family conflicts or transitions not involving marriage or life partnership, including communication and other dysfunctions within family systems; generational or successional issues affecting family businesses; inter vivos family asset transfers; and trusts, estates, and inheritance-related issues.
Mr. Riviera’s objective is to assist parties, who are committed to avoiding the time, expense, unpredictability, and high emotional cost of litigation, in navigating their life transition through a non-adversarial process which prioritizes transparency and the full exchange of information, thorough and deliberate consideration, taking into account both short and long-term interests, and understanding and compassion.
Where the parties will be interacting with each other going forward, post-divorce, as for example when they will be co-parenting together, the agreements they make effectuating their transition represent both the ending of the principal phase of their lives together and the framing, and the setting of the tone for, the beginning of their new, limited but ongoing, relationship as co-parents. Their agreements, and the manner in which they are reached, establish a precedent and template for interaction between, and problem-solving by, the parties in the future.
As conducted by Mr. Riviera, mediated divorce or negotiation of family conflict or transition offers the opportunity of both securing the best possible agreement for each of the parties and establishing or resetting a model for future interactions between them.
Mr. Riviera is a strong advocate of the integrative mediation format for appropriate cases, and is an active member of the board of directors of Integrative Mediation Bay Area.
Mr. Riviera is a graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center.