Louise Phipps Senft, Founder and CEO of Baltimore Mediation is an attorney and nationally recognized Transformative Mediator for Family, Divorce, Commercial and Complicated Business and Healthcare Issues. She is the author of the best-selling book, Being Relational: the Seven Ways to Quality Interaction & Lasting Change. She is also the creator of a Top 15 Podcast, Blink of an Eye, on trauma and trauma healing, and she is the founder of the non profit I C THAT, the Integrative Center for Trauma Healing, Advocacy and Transformation, changing the way we respond to Spinal Cord Injury.
She has been named a top CEO in the state of Maryland and she has been awarded on multiple occasions the distinguished “Top 100 Women” in Maryland honor. She was elected into the Women’s President’s Organization for top female entrepreneurs, and she has also been voted by the Board of Governors of the International Academy of Mediators as a Distinguished Fellow.
She most recently was awarded Maryland’s “Leadership in Law Award” in 2020 and the ““Humanitarianism Award” in 2019 for her work with the Safe Streets Violence Interrupters. She has dedicated her expertise to work with ex-felons—committed to making a positive difference on the streets of Baltimore City—teaching them methods of self-awareness, relational awareness, and intuitive skills to de-escalate conflict to keep themselves and others on the streets alive and safe.
Professor Senft has pioneered the importance of self-awareness methods for families and leaders, for business and legal negotiators,
and for mediators internationally, which more recently also includes a recognition of generational and collective trauma we carry intergenerationally. She has brought her work to her teaching at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, Insight Initiative, the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, the Loyola Sellinger Business School, and for over 25 years of teaching at the University of Maryland School of Law.
Professionals and leaders from across the state, the U.S. and the globe register for her well-known 40-hour certificate courses
on Conflict Transformation and Mediation Skills from a Relational Approach. She has trained thousands in an approach to conflict resolution that is grounded in relational conflict theory and in Knowing Thyself with a focus on the Enneagram of Personality. She creates opportunities for understanding oneself at a deeper level as a secret to remaining neutral as well as intuitive for assisting others with quality dialogue and empowerment. She is a masterful teacher encouraging all to befriend the internal and external barriers as she weaves in trauma healing understandings and the role of family systems in workplace and politics as well as personality motivations to bring conflict theory to life in her experiential relational teaching.
A Midwesterner who hails from Springfield, Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, Senft “went East” and was educated at the University of Virginia, where she was appointed as a member of the Board of Trustees for the class of 1983 and served as President of Kappa Alpha Theta national sorority. Thereafter, she was hired at Baker and Hostetler law firm in Washington DC in the defamation department where she was footnote editor of the treatise, Synopsis of the Law of Libel & the Right of Privacy by Bruce W. Sanford, one of the nation’s leading First Amendment lawyers. She then attended Washington & Lee University School of Law, where she was Chair of the International Moot Court Program and Founder and President of the Women Law Students Organization. She was elected as the first woman law representative to the over 100-year-old Honor System in the then traditionally all-male undergraduate campus. She graduated with honors and upon graduation, she was voted by her peers and by the law faculty as the Most Outstanding Law Student.
Senft and her husband moved to Baltimore where she practiced commercial law at Whiteford, Taylor & Preston and began a family practice. In her seventh year of litigation practice, she decided to leave her corporate law firm and forge a new alternative way to resolve legal disputes: through face-to-face dialogue. In 1993, she launched Baltimore Mediation, the first mediation firm in Maryland, and the first mediation firm in the US, with a practice focused exclusively on mediation and facilitation for quality interaction, face-to-face dialogue. Today, almost 30 years later, Baltimore Mediation remains a beacon of transformative practices, one of the most successful mediation firms in the U.S. and one of the largest mediation training programs in the U.S. Ms. Senft has personally mediated over 4,000 complicated divorce and family business and trust and estate matters, numerous large scale commercial disputes, and she and her team have facilitated thousands of professionals in departments, hospitals, and corporations facing complicated situations who are interested in navigating with quality dialogue to create inclusion and informed decision making.
Her experience extends to matters related to family, divorce, tax, family business, employment, EEOC, land use and zoning, commercial leases, discrimination, diversity and equity, trust and estates, nonprofit boards, healthcare, hospital integration, healthcare aquisitions, wrongful death, medical malpractice, church and religious crises, and Hopi tribal customs. She had the honor of being appointed by the highest court in Kentucky to mediate the nationally celebrated and intensely disputed Kloiber v Kloiber trusts and estates tax case, which included one of the reputed largest Dynasty Trusts in the U.S. The mediated outcome preserved the status of family trusts as non-marital property.
Ms. Senft’s life was changed when one of her five children was tragically injured in a 2015 freak diving accident in the ocean surf rendering him a quadriplegic. She spent months living by his side in ICU’s and hospitals battling for his life and quality of his care, paralyzed from the neck down. She and her family responded with love and fierce advocacy. Her son Archer’s choice to live and be hopeful has been a beacon to many. She brings this life experience combined with her years of intuition, relational practices, and conflict transformation skills to leaders committed to making a difference in the lives of those they serve. She created Blink of an Eye Podcast in 2020 during the Pandemic, her own storytelling of her experience with Archer and the medical profession, which includes trauma healing insights and learnings. Blink of an Eye has thousands of listeners across the U.S. In 2021, she founded the non-profit, the Integrative Center for Trauma Healing, Advocacy, and Transformation, I C THAT, to be a national resource to families and medical teams to change the way we respond to Spinal Cord Injury
She has served on both Democrat and Republican Governors’ task forces advising in Government transition, crime control, juvenile crime, After-School Programming, and Family Initiatives. She has been a close advisor to Maryland’s highest court’s Chief Judge on Alternative Dispute Resolution issues. She has been a close advisor for Fortune 100 Executives for navigating complex commercial transitions and creating cohesive boards of directors and Executive Leadership teams. And she is a founding Trustee for the Convergence Center for Policy Resolution in Washington, D.C., to help members of Congress from both parties talk with each other.
As a result of her son’s accident and her advocacy, she was recently appointed by Governor Hogan and approved by the Maryland Senate to serve on the Maryland Board of Physicians, regulating licensure and discipline in healthcare.
Whether through her Podcast, Blink of an Eye, her writings and teachings, or her keynote speeches, Louise brings a message of Being Relational in everyday living, eliciting the stories of others and the inner wisdom of a wide range of experts, with a focus on conflict, trauma and healing, epiphanies and miracles, and the art of living a full authentic life, despite setbacks and the transactional decisions of others.
She is also a Dame in the Order of Malta, and has served as the President of her Parish Council, the first woman to be elected to the role, and on the Archdiocese of Baltimore Community Foundation and the Archdiocese of Arlington Review Board.
She is called upon frequently as an inspirational keynote speaker and wise teacher.
Ms. Senft can be reached at Louise@BaltimoreMediation.com.
You may also schedule a consult with her team at https://calendly.com/baltimoremediation/30minfreeinitialcall?back=1&month=2022-03