Kathy J. Holub

Kathy J. Holub is a Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School and the founder of Holub Consulting, which specializes in family wealth advising and dispute resolution. She works with both family groups and individuals, helping them navigate difficult conversations and find solutions while strengthening relationships. Her work focuses largely on estates, family enterprises, and other issues involving family dynamics and money. She has also designed and led negotiation training programs for senior executives in a wide range of fields, including biotech, communications, law, finance, health care, education, and government. 

Holub has taught negotiation at Harvard Law School since 2006 and at Columbia Law School since 2001. For the past two years, she has taught a mini-version of that course as a three-day workshop at Yale Law School. She has edited four books, including two on negotiation: Beyond Winning: Negotiating to Create Value in Deals and Disputes (Harvard University Press, 2000), and Bargaining With the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight (Simon & Schuster, 2010).

After graduating from Yale Law School, Holub clerked for the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor, then of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and practiced law as an associate at Howard Smith & Levin LLP in New York City.

Before entering law, Holub pursued a wide-ranging career in journalism, serving as a staff writer at the Delta Democrat-Times (Greenville, MS) and the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, CA). In 1990, she shared a Pulitzer Prize in General News Reporting for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. From 1991 to 1992, Holub held a Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, where she took her first negotiation course at Stanford Law School. She credits that course for being the catalyst that changed her career.