J. Warren Wood III

Warren WoodWarren Wood served for nearly thirty years as a senior executive of one of the nation’s largest foundations, a major grantmaker operating exclusively in the health and health care field and a substantial institutional investor in both the international and domestic arenas. He is an experienced and respected business and commercial mediator and arbitrator, and is a leading figure in the field of global dispute resolution.

Business Experience

As Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Wood was responsible for

  • the development, implementation, and ongoing oversight of the legal structure and framework for reviewing, processing, awarding, and monitoring Foundation grants and program-related investments, which reached an aggregate annual level of $556 million.
  • negotiating, drafting and implementing all agreements pursuant to which the Foundation entered into the investment of its assets, aggregating $8-9 billion. These investments took a variety of forms, from limited partnerships, private equity funds, hedge funds, real estate funds and other alternative investments, to individual equity and fixed income accounts. Following the funding of the investment vehicles, he provided specific advice as issues arose with respect thereto and participated in the evaluation of investment performance of each such investment as well as the portfolio as a whole.
  • the organization and conduct of the activities of the Board and its Governance and Nominating, Finance and Investment, and Audit Committees, including drafting new sets of corporate documents in response to the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, such as innovative bylaws and a corporate code of conduct to deal with the issues raised by this legislation in the context of the nonprofit corporation.

Dispute Resolution

Warren Wood’s Specialties
  • Corporate Governance
  • Non-Profit Foundations
  • Banking
  • Investments
  • Healthcare
  • German-read
  • Dispute Resolution
  • Financial Services

Wood has a wealth of experience as arbitrator and mediator of various business and commercial disputes, including disputes involving international transactions, investment securities matters, corporate transactions, and health and health care matters. He serves on the American Arbitration Association’s panel of commercial arbitrators and on the panel of international arbitrators of the AAA’s International Centre for Dispute Resolution; and is a member of a number of regional arbitration panels, including the Cairo Regional Centre for International Commercial Arbitration and the Arbitration Centre of the Caracas Chamber of Commerce. He is also a Federal Court mediator for the District of New Jersey.

Wood served as chief executive officer of the Global Center for Dispute Resolution Research, a New York City-based international organization providing the global community of international neutrals, advocates, government officials, and scholars with insight, data, analysis, and guidance on the structure, growth, and best practices of international dispute resolution. The Global Center’s activities centered around its annual conferences of leaders in the field, the first held in The Hague in 2004 and the second in New York City in 2005. During these conferences, cutting-edge issues in the practice of international dispute resolution were examined, including those dealing with cross-border investment matters involving disputes resolved under the auspices of, among others, the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes of the World Bank.

Organizations and Affiliations

Wood served on the Board of Directors of the American Arbitration Association, and on its joint AAA/American Bar Association/American Medical Association Commission on Health Dispute Resolution, and on the AAA task force on ADR and Mass Torts. He served on the Board of Directors of the American Corporate Counsel Association, is on the Executive Committee of the Justice Garibaldi American Inn of Court for Alternative Dispute Resolution, chairs the Board of the Philadelphia-based Biotechnology Foundation Laboratories, and is a member of the International Advisory Council of the International Center for Corporate Responsibility, New York City. He is a member of the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States and the bars of the states of New Jersey, New York and Virginia.

Education

Wood earned an A.B. degree from Princeton University and a J.D. degree from the University of Virginia School of Law where he was elected to the Editorial Board of the Virginia Law Review and to the Order of the Coif.

Other Experience

Prior to law school, he was a commercial lending officer at Bankers Trust Company in the bank’s 280 Park Avenue and 14-16 Wall Street offices, providing a range of financial and advisory services to multinational corporate customers headquartered in New York City. As a U.S. Army Captain, he served in various positions with a field artillery battalion in Germany culminating in command of the Battalion’s Headquarters and Service Battery. Wood has a reading knowledge of German.