Concerted Action

At 8:45 a.m. on a Monday, 15 minutes before an interview for this feature on David Hoffman is scheduled to begin, the writer’s email pings. It’s Hoffman’s obituary.

It begins: “As you may already know, David earned his wings last night—he passed peacefully in his sleep.”

At 9:00, a very much alive David Hoffman appears. Casual T-shirt, a much-loved baseball cap pulled low, a glint in the eye. “Nothing concentrates the mind quite like an execution date,” he says, paraphrasing the 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson. 

He wrote the obituary himself, and his attitude toward it is anything but somber. He likens it to the Buddhist monk training in which they stay with the recently departed in order to fully experience death. “It’s not morbid,” he says. “It’s in service of life, and appreciating how precious and ephemeral life is.”

Hoffman lost his second wife, Beth, of 34 years, to Stage 4 lung cancer in 2014. One year after her diagnosis, Hoffman got his own: prostate cancer.

“Getting Beth’s terminal diagnosis caused us to take account of mortality in a very different way,” says Hoffman, whose cancer is in remission. “I survived Beth and wrote her obituary. It’s one thing to be survived by your spouse who knows your story well … but there’s ways in which my kids don’t know all of mine. I thought I would spare them the bother of looking up all kinds of facts.”

He learned a lot from writing his own obit. It deepened his sense of the costs and benefits of a demanding career. It inspired reflection. “If I were to go back, would I do things differently? Maybe,” he says. “But I think it has helped me focus on what I want to do with the years I have left.”

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Hoffman is the founder of Boston Law Collaborative, a boutique ADR firm he established in 2003 after nearly two decades at Boston’s Hill & Barlow—minus the sabbatical he took in 2000 to hike the Appalachian Trail, end to end, with his son. At 79, he has mediated and arbitrated more than 2,000 cases—commercial disputes, family breakups, employment claims, construction failures—while teaching at Northeastern and Harvard. In 2015, the American Bar Association awarded him its highest honor in dispute resolution. He’s given a TEDx Talk and written quite a bit on the subject, including the book The Art of Impasse-Breaking in Mediation, which the ABA published last December. Last year he also developed and taught a course for the Internal Family Systems Institute called The Self-Led Lawyer and Mediator, which he plans to do again in early 2027.

Not exactly the résumé you’d expect of a man who lived for years on a commune in Ithaca, New York, scraping by as a self-taught woodworker.

To understand Hoffman—the woodworking hippie who went to Harvard Law—you need to go back to his Baltimore elementary school. A “short, nerdy kid deeply fascinated with science, sputnik and the space race,” Hoffman was the kind of 8-year-old who often found himself with a target on his back. “Oh, the oppression of the schoolyard,” he says. “For some, being bullied metabolizes into becoming a bully. For others, it metabolizes into identification and sympathy for the underdog.”

He took the latter path. By the time he was 16, Hoffman spent his Saturdays on the picket line outside a downtown Baltimore department store that refused to hire Black clerks. Eventually, the store changed its policy. “Marching with African Americans from the Congress of Racial Equality was a profoundly shaping experience,” he says. “Particularly discovering that concerted action can actually lead to change.”

The throughline that binds it all is his faith. 

His parents, Edward and Pauline, were the children of immigrants from the shtetls of Eastern Europe. They passed along their fervent commitment to Judaism, and to tikkun olam (“to heal the world”), to their son. 

“For me, tikkun olam is very much connected with the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, the women’s rights movement, the environmental movement—every movement for social justice,” Hoffman says.

At Princeton, he majored in literature. “A big part of what I was focused on was political protest, the anti-war movement, and being a hippie,” he says. “I embraced the counterculture, but also was trying to figure out what kind of career I wanted to have.”

He thought he’d become a professor, and pursued a Ph.D. at Cornell on a fellowship. But, in the fourth year of the program, as he was working on his dissertation, his funding ran out and his first marriage fell apart. 

His father, a dentist, was also an amateur woodworker. Hoffman had watched him hone his craft, he had his father’s tools, and he needed money. What started out with a few cutting boards and wooden toys for a Christmas craft fair turned into a seven-year journey.

“It was very consistent with the hippie ethos, being self-reliant,” he says. “There’s a little bit of Thoreau mixed in there, being independent from big corporations and government. You create your own industry.”

But the question in his heart remained: How was he making the world a better place?

He wasn’t sure he was. Thus far, law had never entered the equation. “It was way too establishment,” he says. “Just by virtue of having a law degree, you automatically have a certain degree of power and authority—very suspect in the mind of this particular hippie.”

What changed his thinking was reading about movement lawyers—the attorneys who show up to get activists out of jail, who litigate cases that shift history. He could be that kind of lawyer. 

He applied to Harvard Law School and was surprised to get in. He and Beth moved to the Boston area in 1981. After graduating and clerking for future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer at the 1st Circuit, Hoffman joined Hill & Barlow, attracted to its robust pro bono culture.

He spent the next several years as a litigator, handling civil rights cases on the side. He took a year’s leave to work at the ACLU, and when he came back, he took a case that had been sitting unresolved for nearly a decade.

It was a roof failure case—a building owner suing a manufacturer. When Hoffman looked at the gap between what each side would accept, it was $100,000. Each side had already spent $300,000 each on legal fees.

“I thought, This doesn’t make any sense,” he says. “And it doesn’t serve the cause of social justice for us to be expending legal resources, court resources, on cases that you can mediate.”

Back at Harvard, his faculty adviser had been Frank Sander, one of the founders of the practice of alternative dispute resolution in the United States. He had created and taught the first mediation course offered at an American law school.

Did Hoffman take it? 

“No,” he says. “I was only interested in litigation.”

Now he found himself calling his former advisor.

“I said, ‘Frank, the light has finally dawned on Marblehead, and I am interested in ADR. What should I do?’” Sander told him to get trained as a mediator, get trained as an arbitrator, and form an ADR practice group at Hill & Barlow. Hoffman did all three. 

“I read widely, deeply, voraciously in the literature of ADR, which in the late 1980s was a small-but-burgeoning field,” Hoffman says.

The idea of going out on his own was a conclusion he arrived at after doing the work at Hill & Barlow for some time. “I realized that my kids wouldn’t miss a meal if I set up my own firm,” he says. “Hill & Barlow, like many Boston firms, was moving in a more corporate direction. And my practice was, in effect, a solo practice. I didn’t deploy platoons of associates and paralegals.”

In 2003, he opened the doors at Boston Law Collaborative. Audrey Lee joined the group in 2015 after a stint as a mediator and trainer at the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. She co-teaches mediation courses with Hoffman at Harvard, and she still remembers her first meeting with him.

“He seemed really interested in me—getting to know me and my background and my different experiences,” Lee says. “I think that is one of David’s unique superpowers. He can be so present and so genuine in making a connection with people.”

It’s a quality, she says, that carries directly into the classroom and into his work with colleagues. “David always tries to create an opportunity and space for other people to figure out how they’d like to do something,” she says.

Hoffman’s is not the “headbanger’s” school of mediation. His approach is slower, more relational. “It rests on really seeing people,” Lee says.

He’s seen what happens to people who settle but leave unsettled. “These people aren’t at peace,” he says. “I am concerned that people might leave my mediation room having resolved their case, but feeling deeply troubled. This has led me to seek more knowledge and understanding in the area of psychology. … My style is much more informed by psychology, relationality and wanting people to feel deeply heard and understood.”

Hoffman recalls a sex discrimination case in which an upper-level manager had been laid off; the company said her position was being eliminated, then hired a man to do her work under a different title. By the end of a long day of mediation, the company offered $250,000. It was as far as they would go.

Hoffman sat with the woman and her lawyer in a private caucus.

“I said to her, ‘Having spent the day with you, I’ve come to see how there’s a big part of you who doesn’t want to settle because you want to fight the good fight for women’s rights.’ And she said, ‘Absolutely.’ And I said, ‘I’m also hearing that there’s a part of you that’s very worried about what could be a two- or three- or four-year lawsuit when you’re the primary earner in your family.’ And she said, ‘Yes, that too.’”

Hoffman paused. Then he said: “I think we all have a mediator inside us that listens to these different parts and helps us make a wise decision. And I wonder if you can feel that mediator inside you.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know I need to settle this and move on.”

She stood up and gave her lawyer a hug. Then she gave Hoffman a hug.

“That was one of those moments where I felt like I didn’t need to twist anybody’s arm,” he says. “I simply needed to help someone make a wise, self-led decision.”

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In the years since writing his obituary, Hoffman has married again, to wife Leslie, and he’s still finding new ideas to communicate with his teaching. His newest course, for the Internal Family Systems Institute, draws on a psychological model he believes the legal profession has barely begun to engage with. It is, he says, “a very powerful, intuitive, nonpathologizing model” for helping people navigate conflict at the level where conflict actually lives: inside.

“Making the world a better place, of course, means making sure that people have homes, food, jobs, education, healthcare, the basics of survival,” he says. “But real happiness has an internal component. It’s important for us as professionals to see the people that we work with three-dimensionally and recognize that their case isn’t just a case of applying law to facts and trying to get the best financial outcome. There are many other components to what our clients want and need.”

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Community First

Inspired by his experiences living on the Ithaca commune, David Hoffman wondered how he could recreate the best parts of that environment. “There are economies of scale when you live in an intentional group with other people,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to connect, learn, and feel supported in hours of need.”

In 1991, he and Beth learned about a group that wanted to create a co-housing community in Acton, and they joined it as co-founders. “During the next four years, the group met every 10 days for planning sessions—to choose an architect, create bylaws, negotiate zoning issues with the town of Acton, and expand our membership,” he says. “In 1995, Beth and I moved into our house in New View Cohousing, which consisted of 24 homes. By 1996 all of the other members of the community moved into their homes.

“When Beth died, I got the word out to the community that we were going to have a gathering in the common house of our community,” he continues. “Within a few hours, there were people from every single household in our 24-household community to grieve with my kids and me. It was a profoundly moving experience. We show up for each other in that way, in addition to doing things that are fun, like putting on plays, yoga, meditation, having meals together.”

“David has a rare ability to listen deeply to the concerns of others and bring balance and compassion to the inevitable conflicts that arise,” says Nancy Love, a retired educator and co-founder of the community. “He has been instrumental in mediating conflicts in the community, helping us resolve thorny issues like where the chicken coop is placed or what to do when one dog hurts another. He’s offered several workshops on how to have difficult conversations. His sessions both develop our collective muscle for conflict and help strengthen our bonds of community. … He is kind, openhearted, respectful, principled and generous.”

And handy. Hoffman’s woodworking skills have helped community projects, his cooking draws a crowd to the common house, and he’s even mastered small appliances. “When I broke my air fryer, it was David who came by to fix it,” she says.

Not long after Love met Hoffman, before the community was built, her stepdaughter passed away. “I was so surprised when David showed up at our house to mourn with us,” she says. “He embodies the spirit of collaboration, caring, and commitment that gives life to our co-housing community.”