Edward K. Hamilton, Chairman of HR&A, is a nationally recognized authority in an extraordinarily broad range of fields. The originator of the firm's work in public and private management, economic and financial forecasting, litigation support analysis, insurance claim valuation and negotiation, alternative dispute resolution and international affairs, he also founded and continues to head HR&A's thriving executive search practice, which specializes in CEO-level and other senior executive positions in public and not-for-profit organizations.
In addition to countless smaller projects, Hamilton has directed some of the largest and most influential public policy related analyses ever undertaken, often in very contentious political circumstances. To take just a few examples:
• He led the first comprehensive exploration of the interlinked workings of tort law and the liability insurance system as practiced in America's largest state, and led a similar effort in New York State a decade later.
• He led the team that produced authoritative projections of the public finance consequences of the proposed MX missile siting plan, which, if executed, would have been the largest construction project in human history.
• He directed the first computer model simulation of the probable effects of 37 different desegregation proposals on the nation's second largest school system.
• Over the course of 11 years, he headed the team that conducted the only three comprehensive studies of the Los Angeles rental housing stock that have ever been performed.
• He directed a nationwide, 40-city examination of the internal economics and range of municipal contracting variance with regard to cable television franchising, and a 25-metropole study of mass transit markets and Authorities.
• He was the principal drafter of the Report which first proposed what has become the standard approach to asbestos and other mass tort claim handling, and directed the analysis which was the basis for settlement of In re Agent Orange, the largest single piece of civil litigation in U.S. history in terms of number of putative plaintiffs.
Other examples abound.
Hamilton is also known for taking on the tougher executive search challenges. He has led successful searches for school Superintendents amid political firestorms in Boston and Los Angeles, and for heads of major public library systems in Seattle and Boston. He has directed searches for CEOs of such major grantmakers as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ewing Kauffman Foundations, and the German Marshall Fund. He has found CEOs for such leading operating non-profits as the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, the Sierra Club (now EarthJustice) Legal Defense Fund, the Environmental Information Center, the Public Policy Institute of California, and the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. He has recruited such internationally oriented executives as the Secretary-General of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the President of The Population Council, the President of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and the President of the Foundation for the Americas. He has found effective Deans and appointees to Chairs at such major institutions as Indiana University and the University of Southern California, and the head of the Program on Negotiation at the Harvard Law School. And, just below the CEO level, searches he has led have produced a long list of Vice Presidents, including the principal program heads at the MacArthur Foundation, many of the recent Program Director appointees at the Pew Charitable Trusts, and operating and research executives at a wide variety of non-profit organizations.
Before co-founding HR&A in 1976, Hamilton served as First Deputy Mayor of New York, Senior Member of the National Security Council staff in the White House, Interim Finance Director of the State of California, and Assistant to the Federal Budget Director. He has taught public management and policy analysis at the Stanford Business School and UCLA's Anderson Graduate School of Management, and has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. He has received the Louis Brownlow Prize from the American Society for Public Administration, and (with F.F. Rabinovitz) the James Webb Prize for Urban Research from the National Academy of Public Administration (of which both he and Rabinovitz are elected members). A former member of the Boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aetna Foundation, and the American Society for Public Administration (to which he was elected from the nation at large), he is currently on the Boards of the Public Policy Institute of California and the Pacific Council on International Policy. Hamilton is based in the Los Angeles office, but his practice takes him to the Midwest and/or East Coast virtually every week.
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