John Paul Jones

Practice Areas and Specialization

John Paul Jones is the founder and President of The John Paul Jones Group, and resides in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the firm is headquartered. He received his B.S. degree from Florida State University and his J.D. from Vanderbilt University School of Law, where he was elected to Order of the Coif and was an editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review. Admitted in Florida, Georgia and Virginia, he practiced employment law for 25 years on a national basis and appeared before United States District Courts in 15 states and argued before the United States Courts of Appeal for the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eleventh Circuits, as well as The Supreme Court of the United States.

ADR Specialist: His familiarity with ADR processes spans over 30 years and for the last 10 years he has limited his practice to mediation and ADR.  He is a Certified Circuit Civil Mediator in Florida and the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida. He mediates on a national basis, encompassing a wide range of cases that includes complex and multiparty cases and in the subject matter areas of employment, commercial litigation, medical malpractice and toxic torts.

He has designed ADR programs for the management of backlogged toxic tort cases and has served as a court-appointed Special Master for ADR in the administration of a broad ADR program to provide mediation and ADR for 2,000 asbestos-related cases.

He was selected as one of the mediators for a mediation program growing out of the settlement of a nationwide lawsuit filed against Merrill Lynch.  Counsel for the class action plaintiffs and Merrill Lynch jointly selected mediators from throughout the country.  He has also served as neutral reviewer in a nationwide program involving the resolution of life insurance claims.

Training: He is a faculty member at The National Judicial College in Reno, Nevada, where for the last eight years he has taught a forty-hour civil mediation course to judges from throughout the country.  For the last several years, he has regularly taught mediation, negotiation and communication in South Africa, and has served as an adjunct professor of ADR at Stetson University College of Law in St. Petersburg, Florida.

He has authored a number of articles in the areas of mediation and ADR, including Legal Ethics and ADR, Mediation Advocacy: Seven Steps for Effective Preparation and Summary Jury Trial.  He is a Chief Justice appointee to Florida’s initial Mediator Qualifications Board of which he is a past chair and continues to serve as a member.  He is a member of SPIDR, the American Bar Association and its ADR Section.

He is a certified practitioner in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a discipline that relates to precise and effective human communication.   With his extensive and intensive study of human communications he brings to mediation or ADR processes keen and insightful facilitation skills to maximize the chances of resolution. 

Further information available by contacting him at johnpaul@jpjgroup.com