Robert S. Rosborough
OF COUNSEL
California State Bar No. 121022
Practice Areas
Homeowners’ association law
Mediation and ADR
Estate planning, probate and trust administration
Elder law
Robert S. Rosborough is a mediator, lawyer, and professor whose practice focuses on two areas: estate planning and related elder issues, and homeowner association law. He also has extensive experience in environmental, land use, and real estate law, and advising small businesses generally. His mediation practice emphasizes elder cases where adult families face conflict over everything from caring for an aging parent to running the family business to administering a family trust. More generally, he mediates disputes growing out of an ongoing relationship among the parties, including homeowner associations and neighbors, partnerships, and small business.
Rob earned his undergraduate degree in environmental engineering summa cum laude from Yale and his law degree from Stanford.
He began his practice in 1985 as an environmental compliance and land use lawyer, practicing for over a decade at Pillsbury Madison & Sutro (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman), one of San Francisco’s oldest and largest law firms. He then practiced on his own, expanding his practice to include other real estate matters (particularly leasing and contracts), as well as general corporate matters.
Rob’s current focus on elder issues and homeowner associations grew out of personal experience in both areas. Rob has served as president of his own homeowners’ association for many of the last 35 years and is intimately familiar with both the complex dynamics of HOAs and the practical everyday tasks, in addition to knowing the controlling law. Similarly, he served as co-trustee of his parents’ trusts at a young age and spent years addressing the challenges of caregiving and conflict over assets. His elder practice includes estate planning with an ongoing personal connection as well as select trust administration and probate matters and advising on elder issues generally.
In 2015, he and a colleague developed a unique course in conflict resolution for everyday life for the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco, where he continues to teach, having expanded to include one of his other passions, botany and the role of plants in the history of civilization. Rob has been the editor of The Marin Lawyer for several years, growing the newsletter into a full-fledged digital magazine. He is an officer of the Marin County Bar Association, scheduled to be president in 2022. He is a volunteer attorney for Legal Aid of Marin, and mediator for the San Francisco Department of Police Accountability and San Francisco’s Community Boards.
Rob is a member of Integrative Mediation Bay Area, the Trusts and Estates section of the California Bar, BALIF (Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom), the San Francisco Network for End-of-Life Care, and the Marin County Section on Aging. He speaks regularly on estate planning and conflict resolution.
As an adjunct to his law and mediation practices, Rob is a certified meditation teacher. He teaches mindfulness practices and iRest meditation (adopted by the Department of Defense for treating PTSD) to lawyers and corporate clients, and at the San Francisco Integral Yoga Institute.
For more information on his mediation practice, please see https://www.manjushrimediation.pro.