Hon. John W. Kennedy , Jr. (Ret.)

Hon. John W. Kennedy, Jr. (Ret.) brings to his dispute resolution practice 47 years of experience as a judicial officer and trial attorney. Judge Kennedy joined JAMS after a distinguished 20-year judicial career in several San Bernardino County courts. He served 2 1/2 years as San Bernardino County's first full-time Presiding Judge, presiding over both the Superior and Municipal Courts.

Judge Kennedy also has decades of accounting experience, having worked for his father’s accounting business growing up and later working as an accountant during and after college. That has given him specialized insight into issues that regularly arise during the ADR process.

These issues include computing past and future lost profits, determining the value of income-producing real estate, calculating damages, computing trust distributions between income and principal beneficiaries, analyzing forensic CPA or evaluation testimony, computing allocation of profits between general versus limited partners and other accounting matters involved in business, commercial, insurance, family law and real estate disputes.

ADR Experience and Qualifications

• Extensive experience in handling cases in a wide variety of fields including product liability, medical malpractice, inverse condemnation, wrongful termination, insurance coverage and bad faith, toxic torts, mass torts, premises liability and business disputes; significant experience in business management and accounting
• Spent the last 6 years on the Superior Court handling settlement, law and motion, and trials of complex civil cases; in that assignment, he was responsible for managing and trying the court's longest and most complicated multiple-party civil matters
• Considerable experience in family law, having spent 3 1/2 years as the Supervising Judge of the San Bernardino Family Law Departments and settling more than 1,000 disputes

Representative Matters

• Since joining JAMS in 2000, Judge Kennedy has handled more than 1,500 cases, including:
  • Mediated and supervised the settlement of countless commercial disputes, the settlement often involving reorganization or liquidation of assets, often real estate. Some cases involved supervising the waterfall distribution of sales proceeds according to investment fund agreements.
  • Mediated and Arbitrated numerous claims of fraud, mismanagement, self-dealing, and breach of fiduciary duty. Some cases have involved as few as two participants, some dozens, and several have involved hundreds of investors in various real estate funds.
  • Mediated and Arbitrated more than 1000 cases involving real estate valuations. Most cases were in the context of condemnation proceedings. Cases involving real estate valuation have also arisen in corporate, LLC, partnership, or REIT disputes. The properties involved range from commercial to residential, from a resort in Hawaii to a hotel/casino in Las Vegas, to student housing in Mississippi; from a small used auto tire shop to some of the largest retail malls in California; from large medical office consortiums to hospital parking lots; and one cemetery.
  • Large class action case involving investor claims against individual trustees in Medical Capital securities litigation
  • High value case involving merger and acquisition group’s breach of contract dispute with national bank
  • Nine-figure arbitration award in Hotels Nevada hotel/casino breach of contract dispute
  • Eight-figure arbitration regarding failure of race track’s artificial surface
  • Multiple cases involving high value condemnation and inverse condemnation cases