Jonathan R. Harkavy

Jonathan R. Harkavy is a partner at Patterson Harkavy, LLP. With decades of legal experience, Jon now limits his practice to alternative dispute resolution, including arbitration, mediation and neutral evaluation. Jon has conducted well over 4000 mediations and has served as an arbitrator in more than 100 disputes. He has special experience in class actions, complex commercial disputes and a wide variety of employment disputes. He has been listed in every edition of Best Lawyers and maintains a national practice in the dispute resolution field.

Jon graduated from Columbia University School of Law in 1968. He clerked for the Hon. Richard T. Rives of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit before joining Carter, Ledyard & Milburn in New York City. After several years of practice there, he joined this firm’s predecessor in Greensboro in 1973.

Jon devotes considerable time to academic inquiry and writing, including annual publication for the last 30 years of an analysis of employment and labor decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. Since the summer of 2018, Jon has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard Law School in the Labor and Worklife Program. He has also taught securities law and corporate finance at Duke Law School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law. For many years he also taught labor and employment courses at Wake Forest University School of Law. Jon has authored a large number of essays, contributed to several books in the employment and ADR fields and is the co-author of the practice volume of Larsen’s Employment Discrimination. He is listed in the top 10% of authors on the SSRN (Social Sciences Research Network.) Jon has also lectured frequently in the fields of dispute resolution and employment law.

The recipient of a number of professional awards, Jon has served as president of the former 18th Judicial District Bar, chair of the Dispute Resolution Section, Labor and Employment Section and Appellate Rules Committee of the North Carolina Bar Association and co-chair of an American Bar Association subcommittee. He is a member of the New York Bar and the North Carolina Bar and an emeritus member of the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference.