Judge Francis is a Mediator and Arbitrator at JAMS. From 1985 until 2017, he served as a U.S. Magistrate Judge in the Southern District of New York, after which he spent two years as a Distinguished Lecturer at the CUNY School of Law where he taught Electronic Discovery. Judge Francis received his B.A. from Yale College in 1974, his juris doctor degree from the Yale Law School in 1978, and a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University, also in 1978. Following graduation from law school, he clerked for the Honorable Robert L. Carter in the Southern District of New York. He then joined the Civil Appeals and Law Reform Unit of the Legal Aid Society where he conducted impact litigation in the areas of housing and education and served as director of the Disability Rights Unit. For more than a decade, he taught Constitutional Torts as an adjunct professor at the Fordham University School of Law. Judge Francis speaks frequently on electronic discovery and is a member of the Judicial Advisory Committee of The Sedona Conference, the Steering Committee of Sedona’s Working Group 6, the Advisory Committee of the Georgetown Advanced E-Discovery Institute, and the Advisory Board of the Cardozo Data Law Initiative.