Our Team
Agreement Resources, LLC offers a panel of experienced mediators, facilitators, consultants, conflict coaches and trainers to ensure the best fit for your dispute resolution or training needs. Arline Kardasis • Rikk Larsen • Honorable John Maher
Crystal Thorpe • Blair Trippe • Stephen Linskey
Arline Kardasis is a mediator, trainer, conflict coach and founding partner of Agreement Resources, LLC. and Elder Decisions. Her family mediation and conflict coaching practice includes divorce, post-divorce and marital mediation as well as elder mediation.
In the workplace environment, Arline consults, coaches and provides conflict resolution trainings to employees and managers in addition to acting as a third party neutral mediator for workplace and commercial disputes.
Arline is a mentor and coach for mediators in the Massachusetts courts through Mediation Works Incorporated and she has coached executives and law students in conflict resolution and mediation skills. She mediates civil disputes for the Boston Bar Association Boston Municipal Court Program and is on several divorce mediation panels. She has written about family mediation for Mediate.com and, with Rikk Larsen, she co-wrote “When Aging Issues Lead to Family Conflict” for Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.
Arline is on the Board of Directors of the New England Chapter of the Association for Conflict Resolution and is the former Newsletter Editor. She is a member of the Massachusetts Council on Family Mediation and serves on the Public Awareness Subcommittee for the Massachusetts Trial Court’s Standing Committee on Dispute Resolution. Arline was trained at Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation and by the Center for Social Gerontology and she has received extensive advanced trainings in elder, divorce, and employment mediation. She received her BA in Political Science and Urban Studies from Boston University and her MAT with honors from Simmons College.
Rikk Larsen is a founding partner of Elder Decisions where he is a mediator, trainer and conflict coach. He has created and presented conflict skills trainings to eldercare professionals from around New England. Rikk serves on a Subcommittee for the Massachusetts Trial Court’s Standing Committee on Dispute Resolution. This year he co-presented “Using Mediation in Elder Law” at the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys and presented a workshop “When Families Struggle with Dementia: Facilitating Solutions through Mediation” at the Dartmouth Alzheimer’s Conference. Rikk is a former case coordinator for Family and Probate Court and a case liaison for Small Claims Court for the Harvard Mediation Program. He attended Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation. He is a member of the New England Chapter of the Association for Conflict Resolution and the Massachusetts Council on Family Mediation. He received his BA from Williams College and his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Honorable John R. Maher - Judge Maher has an active mediation/arbitration practice, concentrating in the areas of trusts and estates, elder law, real estate, and business dissolutions. Judge Maher served as the Administrative Judge of the New Hampshire Probate Courts from 1990 until he retired in 2007. A pioneer in the judicial side of the mediation field, he was instrumental in the creation of the mediation program in the New Hampshire Probate Courts in 2002. He was the Probate Judge for Rockingham County, New Hampshire from 1983 until 2007. During that period, he presided over hundreds of litigated cases dealing with real estate, trusts, estates, guardianships and other elder law issues. He studied mediation at Pepperdine Law School in Malibu, California and recently completed the Graduate Certificate Program in Conflict Studies at Woodbury College in Montpelier VT.
Crystal Thorpe is a mediator, trainer and principal of Agreement Resources, LLC, specializing in workplace conflict resolution and divorce mediation, and a founding partner of Elder Decisions – which provides conflict resolution services for eldercare professionals, seniors and their families. She has over ten years of experience in the corporate and non-profit sectors in the areas of training, human resources, quality assurance and consulting. She has developed and conducted conflict resolution skills trainings for professionals and teens, and coaches executives and law students in conflict resolution and mediation skills. In addition to her private mediation practice, Crystal mediates on several panels including the Massachusetts Trial Court’s Juvenile Court Department where she mediates Parent/Child cases through MWI, and the Middlesex Multi-Door Courthouse - Superior Court Department where she mediates Prisoner cases. She is a member of the Association for Conflict Resolution and the Massachusetts Council on Family Mediation.
Crystal served as the Boston Dispute Settlement Board Administrator for DeMars & Associates in its contract with Ford Motor Company for resolving consumer/company disputes. She recently served on the Public Awareness Working Group and the Court Systems Working Group for the Massachusetts Trial Court’s Standing Committee on Dispute Resolution. Crystal received mediation training from The Center for Mediation in Law, The Center for Social Gerontology, Harvard Negotiation Program’s Insight Initiative, and the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC), and has received extensive advanced trainings in elder, divorce, and family mediation. She holds an MSW and an MBA from Boston College and an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science/Psycholinguistics, magna cum laude, from Brown University.
Blair Trippe is a mediator, trainer and principal of Agreement Resources, LLC where she mediates workplace and family disputes including eldercare and estates issues. She also mediates cases referred from the District Court Department for the Massachusetts Trial Courts. In addition to her mediation work, Blair has developed and presented numerous workshops and training programs in Negotiations, Conflict Resolution Skills, and Peer Mediation for professionals and teens. Blair recently presented to the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys (NAELA), served on the faculty of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center’s conference on Alzheimer’s disease, and presented at the Map Through The Maze Conference of the Alzheimer’s Association. She recently was featured in a SHRM (Society for Human Resources Management) article entitled “Conflict Management Contributes to Communication.” She earned an MBA in marketing and finance from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a BA in psychology from Connecticut College. She received basic and advanced mediation training from The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Mediation Works Incorporated (MWI) in Boston, The Dispute Resolution Center at Northwestern University in Chicago, and The Center for Social Gerontology in Ann Arbor. Blair worked as a Marketing Specialist at Prudential Bache Securities in New York and was Director of Marketing and Industry Affairs for The Straumann Company, a healthcare start-up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a former Board member of the New England Association of Conflict Resolution, a member of the Association for Conflict Resolution also a member of the Massachusetts Council on Family Mediation.Stephen M. Linsky is a mediator, arbitrator, and collaborative attorney who has provided dispute resolution services over the past twenty years in many hundreds of private, court and public agency connected matters in nearly all areas of civil practice, particularly in the areas of family and employment. A graduate of Northeastern University School of Law in 1986, he currently serves as a member of the board of the Massachusetts Collaborative Law Council and has also served as co-chair of the ADR Committee of the Boston Bar Association from 2001-2004. He is a former founding member of The New Law Center and currently co-principal of Family Co-Mediation. He has presented and instructed in dispute resolution for a variety of professional organizations, bar associations, and institutions of higher education.
Kardasis, Larsen and Thorpe photos courtesy of Neponset Valley Senior News/Rick Booth