Philadelphia Judge Lisa M. Rau.

Retired Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Lisa M. Rau has started her own mediation and arbitration firm overlooking City Hall.

In an announcement Tuesday, Rau announced the creation of Resonate Mediation and Arbitration, in which she said she will draw on her nearly 20 years of experience as a judge and time working as a civil attorney.

"After nearly two decades, I saw firsthand that the people who resolved their own disputes with the help of a judge mediator and their lawyers were more satisfied with the outcome and could move forward more easily than those who proceeded to combative and risky trials followed by lengthy and expensive appeals," Rau said. "Now, I want to focus exclusively on helping people with this more satisfying avenue of achieving civil justice."

Rau, who is married to current Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, was appointed to the bench in 2001 by former Gov. Tom Ridge. Rau initially heard criminal cases, where she was one of a handful of judges to be criticized by then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham for alleged leniency with defendants.

Rau later moved on to oversee a civil docket, where she spent more than 15 years handling civil cases. Rau often oversaw complex litigation, including malpractice and products liability cases. In March she oversaw a case involving a fall through a skylight, which resulted in a nearly $25 million verdict.

She also held leadership roles on the bench, including spending five years as team leader of major civil trials, organizing the judicial fellowship program in 2011, overseeing the court's Zoloft mass tort, helping implement mandatory mediation for landlord-tenant appeals and acting as co-chairwoman of the court's judicial education committee.

Before becoming a judge, Rau was a partner at the well-known civil rights firm Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg & Lin, and before that she worked in the Public Interest Law Center.

She earned her bachelor's degree from Colgate University and her law degree from Stanford Law School.

In an August interview with The Legal, just after she announced her retirement from the bench, Rau said she looked forward to a new "adventure."

"As the child of a military pilot we lived all over the world, including Kabul, Afghanistan. I learned early on to appreciate adventures," she said. "This job certainly has been incredibly rewarding. There hasn't been a single day in the last 18 years-plus that I didn't appreciate the responsibility that Philadelphians gave me to serve this vital role in our system."