The focus of Mr. Betts’s practice is serving as a mediator to litigants and their counsel in lawsuits and arbitrations, and providing other alternative dispute resolution services including arbitrations and early neutral evaluations. Mr. Betts is on the approved roster of neutrals for the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania and has been certified by that Court as qualified to serve as an E-Discovery Special Master and Mediator. Mr. Betts is also on the American Arbitration Association’s national roster of arbitrators for commercial and consumer cases. He also is on the approved list of arbitrators and mediators for cases administered by FINRA Dispute Resolution.

Michael J. Betts has nearly forty years of experience handling and exploring the resolution of a wide range of litigation matters filed in federal and state courts in Pennsylvania, as well as numerous arbitration cases. Those matters include complex commercial cases, business disputes, banking litigation, class actions, consumer litigation, employment litigation, fiduciary litigation, insurance litigation, securities litigation (including FINRA arbitrations), professional negligence cases (legal and accounting malpractice), and trade secret/non-compete litigation. Through his diverse background, Mr. Betts has a breadth of experience and perspectives - as a Litigation Partner with Reed Smith Shaw & McClay (now Reed Smith LLP), as a Principal of Post & Schell, P.C., as in-house litigation counsel of PNC Bank, N.A., and as the managing member of a “boutique” litigation firm. In his private practice, Mr. Betts represented both plaintiffs and defendants and large corporations and individuals, and as a result provides parties in a mediation or other ADR process the full extent of objectivity and impartiality that they are entitled to receive from a mediator and ADR neutral.

Mr. Betts was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Dickinson College in 1977, with a major in economics. Mr. Betts received his law degree in 1980 from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he was a member of its Law Review. Mr. Betts began his legal career in the fall of 1980 with Reed Smith Shaw & McClay (now Reed Smith LLP), where he practiced within the firm's Litigation Department. Mr. Betts was made a Partner of Reed Smith in January 1989 and he continued to practice with the firm until 1994, when he formed a boutique litigation firm that handled commercial litigation and securities litigation matters for more than fifteen years. In 2009, Mr. Betts became Senior Counsel - Litigation for PNC Bank, N.A., with responsibility for the handling of various lawsuits and other claims asserted against the bank. Mr. Betts returned to private practice in 2013. Since then, he has practiced as a litigation principal of the law firm Post & Schell, P.C. and from April 2018 to the present has been the principal and owner of Michael J. Betts LLC, providing mediation and other alternative dispute resolution services in a wide range of cases.