Grande Lum walked into a negotiation class as a student at Harvard Law School and his professional fate was changed forever.

“I went in thinking that ‘negotiation’ was about fighting until you win, so it was transformative to learn that you actually win by finding common ground,” says Lum, who joined the Stanford Law School faculty in July 2023 as a senior lecturer and director of the Martin Daniel Gould Center for Conflict Resolution, which houses the Gould Negotiation and Mediation Program and the Gould Alternative Dispute Research Initiative. “Soon after that class, I saw those ideas in action on a large scale when I had the opportunity to serve as a teaching fellow in a dispute resolution course with South Africans who were involved in negotiating a post-apartheid constitution. It was inspiring and life-changing.”

Finding common ground has been at the heart of Lum’s varied career since that time. His academic, government, private sector, and nonprofit roles have brought him from the halls of Congress to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to Silicon Valley company headquarters, and many classrooms in between. Lum was an adjunct lecturer at SLS from 2016 to 2018 and continued to serve as a Gould research fellow until taking the leadership reins from longtime Gould Center director Janet Martinez, who retired this fall. Other of his career stops include serving as director of the Divided Community Project at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, director of the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution at UC Law San Francisco, and provost and vice president for academic affairs at Menlo College.

Diffusing Tensions During Harrowing Times

In 2012, Lum was tapped by President Barack Obama, his law school classmate, to serve as the director of the Community Relations Service (CRS), an agency within the Department of Justice that serves as the federal government’s “peacemaker” for community conflicts. In this role, Lum led the federal teams that diffused tensions and helped rebuild communities after two of the bleakest moments for race relations in recent U.S. history: the killings of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

“We worked very closely with the mayor and city manager in Sanford, and with the protest groups, to both keep the peace and to allow peaceful protests and the exercise of First Amendment rights,” Lum recalls. “Part of that included working with Black, White, and Latino pastors to first prevent the spread of misinformation and later to promote healing.”

Shortly after Michael Brown had been shot by police officers in August 2014, Lum was on the ground in the St. Louis suburb along with then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Those were among the most tumultuous few days of his career, he says. “We were the first federal agency to get there, and we had relationships with the community leaders in Ferguson, so we moved quickly to arrange a number of tension-diffusing meetings for the attorney general. And it all had to happen in about 48 hours.”

“Grande was a huge asset to the CRS, and our time together working on making things better in Sanford and Ferguson—during very challenging moments for the country—illuminated his ability to bring people together even under the most trying of circumstances,” says Holder, now senior counsel at law firm Covington. “Grande doesn’t just know how to bring people together, he’s masterful at organization, strategy, and moving the ball forward.”

Bridging Differences in Congress and Online, Leveraging Technology

Since 2021, Lum has been a leader in the Rebuild Congress Initiative, a nonpartisan organization that facilitates productive dialogue across the political spectrum. He also lent his talents to a social media site widely recognized for being only slightly less rancorous than Congress: Nextdoor. In 2018, the neighborhood-based platform engaged him for help in addressing incidents of racial profiling on its network. “We were able, in a relatively short time, to significantly reduce the incidence of racial profiling on Nextdoor, and it is something I’m really proud of,” Lum says. “That work impressed upon me the power that these platforms have and that with thoughtful attention to finding fixes they can make a difference.”

One of Lum’s goals as director of the Gould Center is to focus on how technologies such as online dispute resolution and artificial intelligence-based tools can enhance people’s ability to negotiate and mediate. One project includes giving his students the opportunity to hone their negotiation skills against AI “bots.”

“The skills taught in the Gould program are especially critical to lawyers today,” Lum says. After all, he adds, they “are going to be on the front lines of making policy and serving as leaders in public life.”  SL