Mr. Edward K. Hamilton

Edward K. Hamilton is Chairman of Hamilton, Rabinovitz & Associates, Inc.  His career spans an unusual variety of leadership positions in the public and private sectors culminating with more than 30 years as one of the nation’s better known consultants in a wide variety of subject areas and business lines.  He began in Federal service, rising from Assistant to the Federal Budget Director to Senior Member of the National Security Council staff in the White House.  After service as Executive Secretary of an international Commission sponsored by the World Bank, he was appointed Vice President of the Brookings Institution.  He followed this with years of service as First Deputy Mayor of New York.  He then moved to California and two years later co-founded the consulting firm now called Hamilton, Rabinovitz & Associates, Inc. (HR&A), while also teaching at the Stanford Business School.  He later moved the firm's headquarters to Los Angeles and taught at the UCLA Graduate School of Management.

One of his most active consulting lines focused on insurance and its intersection with the tort law.  He was the chief drafter of Righting the Liability Balance, the landmark Report of the California Citizens Commission on Tort Reform which was the first comprehensive look at this entire complex of law and practice.  Ten years later he played the same role in the drafting of Insuring Our Future, the 2-volume Report of the New York Governor’s Advisory Commission on Liability Insurance.  He also performed the feasibility studies which led to establishment of the Institute for Civil Justice at the RAND Corporation, and the Workers Compensation Research Institute.  Meanwhile, he invented the claim valuation and negotiation simulation system known as DATACLAIM which, together with its sister systems, has been administered to the full claims staffs of many of the largest American insurers, including major Workers Compensation carriers, to document both prevailing and best practices for valuing and negotiating bodily injury claims.  He also founded the firm’s very active practice in expert estimation and analysis of mass tort claims which has made HR&A one of the handful of best known and most court-tested consultants in major actions involving asbestos, silicon implants, Agent Orange, the Dalkon Shield and other toxic substances. 

Starting with the search for the first CEO of the Institute for Civil Justice, Hamilton has built one of the nation’s most successful executive search practices focused on very senior positions in non-profit and public interest organizations.  His successful searches now number in the hundreds and include the CEOs of a broad assortment of organizations, ranging from Superintendents of major school districts, to heads of large foundations, to CEOs and seconds-in-command of leading operating non-profits, to leaders of prominent research organizations and library systems, to appointees to deanships and major academic Chairs at universities across the country.  He is also an award winning researcher himself, having received both the Louis Brownlow Prize of the American Society for Public Administration and the James Webb Prize for Urban Research bestowed by the National Academy of Public Administration. 

Hamilton graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BA magna cum laude, followed by two years of graduate work at Harvard.