Director John Calhoun Wells recently announced the appointment of Elizabeth Glazebrook Watson as FMCS General Counsel and Chief of Staff. In these capacities, she will provide oversight of the agency’s legal affairs, and will coordinate and participate in policy matters as a member of the senior management leadership team with the Director and Deputy Directors. Additionally, she will be responsible for FMCS relations and communication with the members and committees of Congress.

Judge Watson comes to FMCS from JAMS/Endispute, a national private-sector mediation/arbitration service, where she mediated or arbitrated employment-related cases involving contracts, employment compensation and benefits, wrongful termination and discrimination claims, and a wide spectrum of disputes involving health care, insurance coverage and benefits, medical malpractice, product liability, banking, telecommunications, intellectual property, domestic relations and personal injury. Approximately 95% of the cases she mediated were successfully resolved.

Prior to joining JAMS/Endispute, she served for eight years as Superior Court Judge and four years as Chief Juvenile Court Judge in the Appalachian Judicial Circuit of North Georgia. Before her service as a judge, she practiced civil and criminal law, and was General Counsel to the Pickens County Hospital and the government of Pickens County, Georgia for eleven years.

Deputy Director Wilma B. Liebman was nominated by President Clinton and sworn in the Board’s Chief Administrative Law Judge Robert Giannasi as a member of the National Labor Relations Board.

Liebman joined FMCS in 1993 and has been Deputy Director since 1995. She previously served as Special Assistant to the Director.

Before joining FMCS, Wilma was labor counsel to the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftsmen from 1990-1993. From 1980 to 1989, she was staff counsel for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Wilma holds a Bachelor’s degree from Barnard College and earned her law degree at George Washington University.

Earlier this year, Mitchell S. Franklin of Minneapolis, Minnesota was named Director of Mediation Services in the Upper Midwestern Region. Commissioner Franklin succeeded Scot L. Beckenbaugh, who became Upper Midwestern Regional Director in March.

As one of two Directors of Mediation Services in the region, Franklin provides supervisory and administrative support to approximately 20 federal mediators handling labor-management disputes and training in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North and South Dakota and Wisconsin.

Mitch has worked in collective bargaining contract negotiations and in providing training in cooperative processes to companies, organizations and their employee unions in Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota. As Director of Mediation Services, he will now be working in a different capacity with many of these same unions and employers.