Hon. Carol Overton (Ret.)

Hon. Carol Overton (Ret.) brings more than four decades of legal experience, including over two decades on the bench.  She began her legal career in 1984 with the Office of the Public Defender of Santa Clara County, practicing criminal law and developing trial skills that she would apply throughout her legal career.  Beginning in 1987, she spent nearly 18 years with the Office of the City Attorney of San Jose in the Litigation Section, where her practice included tort defense, employment law, municipal law, and regulatory enforcement.  During the latter years of her tenure with the San Jose City Attorney’s Office, she handled a variety of unfair business practices and public nuisance cases on behalf of the City, including statutory criminal street gang, drug, and red-light abatement actions, as well as actions to enforce municipal industrial health and safety regulations and minimum housing standards for multi-unit residential rental properties.  This breadth of experience gave Judge Overton firsthand experience with disputes from different perspectives—both defending claims against a public entity and adjudicating affirmative enforcement actions on its behalf. Her twodecades of varied litigation experience established the foundation for her additional two decades of experience on the bench.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Judge Overton to the Santa Clara County Superior Court in 2005. Her judicial assignments in the court’s Criminal Division during her first several years on the bench included misdemeanor trials and felony preliminary hearings, Drug Courtcalendars, and Domestic Violence calendars and trials where she also served as Supervising Judge.

Judge Overton then moved to the court’s Civil Division, where she spent more than 16 years handling a wide variety of civil matters, serving at different times as a trial judge and Case Manager, and in a number of specialized calendar assignments, including commercial and residential unlawful detainer, elder abuse, workplace violence, and civil harassment. Judge Overton also served as a backup judge on the probate calendar after completing the required probate primary assignment training. During her tenure in the Civil Division, she presided over jury and bench trials across abroad range of civil disputes, including employment, probate, torts (including fraud, sexual assault, medical and legal malpractice), personal injury and wrongful death, business litigation, real estate and real property (including construction defects, boundary disputes, easements, and commercial unlawful detainer), family law, elder abuse, and cases involving equitable and injunctive remedies, among others.

Judge Overton’s judicial assignments in the court’s Civil Division also included a formally-dedicated assignment as a settlement judge, making dispute resolution a regular part of her daily work.  In this capacity, Judge Overton served as a judicial neutral for early settlement conferences, mandatory settlement conferences, and judicial ADR, as well as for informal discovery conferences to facilitate resolution of pretrial discovery disputes.  Her work in these areas of alternative dispute resolution encompassed the broad range of civil disputes described above.

At Signature Resolution, Judge Overton continues the dispute-resolution work that was a significant part of her judicial career. She handles complex and otherwise difficult cases with an emphasis on the practical advantages of mediation.  She provides a candid assessment of the case while taking a pragmatic approach that considers the parties’ priorities and objectives.  She works collaboratively with counsel and the parties to develop creative approaches to overcoming obstacles to settlement, while keeping the mediation productively focused on resolving the litigation.