Hon. Frank J. Ochoa (Ret.)

Hon. Frank Ochoa retired in January 2015 from the Santa Barbara Superior Court after more than 32 years as a judge on the trial court bench. He is “Of Counsel” with the Santa Barbara law firm, The Sanger Firm. While on the bench, he served on numerous statewide judicial committees and task forces and was, for a time, assigned to the local division of the California Court of Appeal. Over the years, Judge Ochoa has been the trial court judge in numerous high-profile cases. He also rendered many decisions which had wide ranging impacts, including changing the jury system in Santa Barbara due to a lack of Latino representation in jury pools. Another of his decisions changed the Grand Jury System in Ventura County based on an under-representation of women. He designed and implemented the local adult and juvenile court drug court programs as well as the court’s Alternative Dispute Resolution program, known as the Court Administered Appropriate Dispute Resolution program (CADRe). This program has been a model utilized throughout California in the creation of court connected mediation and other ADR dispute resolution processes. He was the Presiding Judge of the court through the countywide court consolidation process which joined Municipal and Justice Courts under a single Superior Court. He also managed the transition of the court from county funding to a statewide court funding base and administrative structure. He was a founding trustee of the Courthouse Legacy Foundation, a non-profit corporation formed for the purpose of raising funds to preserve and protect the national landmark Santa Barbara County Courthouse. He has lectured and taught judges and lawyers on a wide variety of topics. He has taught law related courses at the Santa Barbara College of Law and the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has taught mediation in professional education programs and courses for judges, lawyers, law students and undergraduate university students. He now operates a private judging practice in the areas of mediation and arbitration; as well as providing other dispute resolution and consulting services. He has resolved thousands of civil cases of all types in his decades on the bench and then as a private judge. He is a Diplomate Member of the National and the California Academies of Distinguished Neutrals and a member of the Southern California Mediation Association. He serves as a private neutral (Arbitrator, Mediator, Referee, Special Master, or Neutral Case Evaluator) on a wide variety of cases locally and throughout Southern California.

No credential information on file.

No honors on file.

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