Bill Eddy, LCSW, Esq.

Bill Eddy came to the law late and from an unusual direction. After a psychology degree at Case Western Reserve University, he spent the 1980s as a clinical social worker in San Diego, first on the inpatient units of a psychiatric hospital and then in an outpatient clinic treating adults, children, and families dealing with depression, substance abuse, and divorce. In the evenings he volunteered as a mediator at a community mediation center, taking his first divorce mediation in 1979.

He kept seeing the same thing from both chairs: a small number of people who turned every dispute into a crisis, blamed everyone around them, and could not be reasoned out of it. Therapy had a vocabulary for that behavior. The legal system did not. So in 1992 he finished law school at the University of San Diego, where he received the Randolph A. Read Law and Psychiatry Award, and opened a family law and mediation practice to work on the problem from inside the courtroom.

Over the next fifteen years he handled more than 400 cases as a Certified Family Law Specialist, mediated more than 500 divorces, and served as Senior Family Mediator at the National Conflict Resolution Center. Out of that caseload came the High Conflict Personality Theory: the observation that high-conflict people share four predictable traits (a preoccupation with blaming others, all-or-nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, and extreme behaviors) and that the usual tools of persuasion, insight, and logic make things worse. He self-published his first book on it in 2003, when, as he puts it, most legal professionals were skeptical that personality patterns belonged in a courtroom.

In 2008 he and Megan Hunter founded the High Conflict Institute to turn that theory into teachable skills. Bill wrote the methods that followed, including the BIFF Response® for hostile emails, EAR Statements™ for calming upset people, the CARS Method® for managing high-conflict situations at work, and New Ways for Families®, a court-adopted skills program for separating parents now used in family courts across the United States and Canada. Since then he has trained judges, lawyers, mediators, therapists, HR leaders, and ombuds professionals in more than 35 states and 13 countries, taught at Pepperdine's Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution for fifteen years, and served as a Conjoint Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle Law School in Australia.

Today Bill is HCI's Director of Innovation. He still delivers roughly sixty trainings a year, consults on difficult cases, writes a Psychology Today column that has drawn more than six million readers, and co-hosts the It's All Your Fault! podcast with Megan. Away from work he hikes, cross-country skis, plays music, and once climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with his wife.