Clark Freshman

Clark Freshman is a tenured professor at University of California, Hastings College of Law, and the world’s most sought after speaker on lie detection, emotion, and nonverbal communication for lawyers and negotiators.

His past engagements include JAMS, the International Academy of Mediators, the Conference of Federal Administrative Law Judges, Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, and Columbia Business School. He has also trained lawyers at their own offices, such as Wilmer Hale in Washington, D.C., Farella in San Francisco, and hundreds of others at open-enrollment events in California, Rome, Denmark, and Minneapolis.

Clark was educated at Harvard (B.A), University College, Oxford (M.A. and Marshall Scholar), and Stanford Law School (J.D). His first great negotiation success came with his research for his senior thesis on the Leo Frank case – the “American Dreyfuss case” that led to the birth of both the Anti-Defamation League and the modern Ku Klux Klan. The Board of Pardons had just recently denied a pardon to Leo Frank when Freshman went to interview them and Jewish organizations that sought the pardon. Over a month period, he drafted a compromise pardon that the Board adopted only months later.

His work has appeared in law reviews at Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, and elsewhere. His articles on negotiation have been reproduced in three major textbooks on negotiation.

From 2004 - 2011, he collaborated with Paul Ekman, the scientific advisor to Fox’s hit Lie to Me. That collaboration included training Homeland Security, serving as the exclusive scholar-teacher authorized to teach lawyers and negotiators, and collaborating on academic research, including a symposium on lies in negotiation.

He also conducts research on emotional truthfulness, lie detection and negotiation with Mike Wheeler, the Harvard Business School Professor and editor of Negotiation Journal. Publications, workshop opportunities, and his blog are available at clarkfreshman.com.

National media, including Public Broadcasting Television’s McNeil-Lehrer report, the Wall Street Journal, and the Miami Herald have reported his views on settlements of major tobacco litigation.

He also provides negotiation coaching, mediation, arbitration, and investigation for individuals and organizations.