Case Planning & Discovery

Ross Dolloff brings more than 25 years of varied legal services experience to his position as National Training Director of the Center for Legal Aid Education. After receiving his JD from the American University’s Washington College of Law in 1980, Ross began his career-long commitment to legal services as a staff attorney in the Selma office of the Legal Services Corp. of Alabama, where his practice involved civil rights and discrimination, voting rights, public benefits entitlement and transactional assistance to community based organization throughout Alabama’s black belt. More recently, after a stint as managing attorney of the Holyoke office of Western Massachusetts Legal Servlces, Ross spent the last fifteen years as the Director of Neighborhood Legal Services in Massachusetts.

Throughout his career, Ross has written extensively about legal services practice, delivery systems and program management and to the development of training for legal services staff. His articles have appeared regularly in both the Management Information Exchange Journal, Clearinghouse Review and legal publications in his home state of Massachusetts. While a managing attorney and then program Director, Ross contributed to the design of training packages for Basic Lawyering Skills, Community Lawyering, and Affirmative Litigation Training and has served as a trainer or presenter for dozens of programs in New England and elsewhere, sponsored by the Center for Legal Aid Education, the New England Training Consortium, individual legal services organizations, state CLE providers and community based organizations.

In 2006, Ross left his Director position to join the Center (then called Legal Aid University). "Throughout my career in legal services, I felt that I had gradually seen a loss of a shared national sense of what it means to be a legal services staff member and advocate and a shared set of expectations and standards for how to do the work creatively and effectively.. I remember the series of training programs available to me when I was starting out – Basic Lawyering Skills, Federal Practice, what was then called Multi-forum advocacy - as invaluable, both in helping me learn the essential skills and craft of lawyering, but perhaps even more in helping me understand the potential role of my legal services practice in the broader effort to change the conditions of poverty in America.

"It was from this shared vision of the potential importance of our work in a larger social change effort that much of my own work and personal vision and values as a legal services worker developed and emerged. As I reached this next stage of my career, having served in many different capacities for much of my adult life in individual local legal services organizations, I looked around and asked myself, what would I want to help establish in our national legal services community in a more general sense. Ultimately, the answer was the redevelopment of that shared system of vision and values, transmitted through a shared set of learning experiences that combined these elements with practical skills training to improve our overall effectiveness and the quality of the work experience for advocates and emerging new leaders. With that as a goal, there was nowhere else to be than here at LAU. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to devote myself to this effort."

Courses Taught

• 2006-2007 NE Leadership Institute
• 2008-2009 NE Leadership Institute
• Case Planning & Discovery
• Community Lawyering
• Essential Skills for Paralegals and Legal Assistants
• Supervision Skills for Equal Justice Providers

Gregory Bass has been in legal services since 1981, with programs in Alabama, Washington, California and Connecticut: for the past 12 years at Greater Harford Legal Aid, where he is litigation director focusing on federal and state court class actions and individual litigation. Throughout his career, Greg has worked in a number of different areas, including benefits, housing, health, family, senior, consumer, employment, and civil rights. He has taught at numerous legal services trainings, many of which have been through CLAE. In his spare time, Greg enjoys racquet sports, hoops, baseball, music, reading, and travel. A Seattle expatriate, he now lives in New England with his wife, son, two dogs and two cats.

Courses Taught

• Affirmative Litigation
• Case Planning & Discovery

Dick Bauer is a Senior Attorney in the Housing Unit at Greater Boston Legal Services, to which he has recently returned after spending most of the past year here at CLAE as the Senior Equal Justice Training Fellow.   An MIT and Northeastern Law School graduate, Dick served as a mentor in CLAE’s inaugural Leadership Institute. He has been in Legal Services since 1982, and a member of the Supreme Judicial Court Standing Advisory Committee on the Rules of Civil Procedure since 1998.  In his other life, Dick is Chair of the Somerville Historic Preservation Commission, the Somerville representative on the Middlesex Canal Commission, Co-Chair of the Jewish Labor Committee, an Executive Committee member and Past President of Congregation Kahal B'Raira, a member of the Social Action Committee of Congregation B’Nai Brith, and a leader in the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. For fun, Dick likes to lead historic bicycle tours and is the Vegvayzer (“way-shower”) of a Workmen’s Circle’s Yiddish conversation group.  His wife Roberta Bauer is a regulatory specialist at the Community Research Initiative of New England. They have three children (including their son-in-law), and recently did the Harbor-to-the Bay AIDS ride on their tandem bicycle for the third time (once again in the pouring rain).

Courses Taught

• Affirmative Litigation
• Case Planning & Discovery

  A trial attorney since 1970, Martin Lawyer has now been at Bay Area Legal Services for over 35 years. He has extensive civil trial and litigation experience in the areas of housing, consumer, and employment law, with a particular substantive specialty in real estate. Martin serves as lead counsel on class action suits, and as Appellate attorney at all levels of Florida and United State Courts (his latest result a win: Basco v. Machin, 514 F.3d1177 [11th Cir. 2008]). He received his J.D. from Vanderbilt University School of Law, and has since made numerous CLE and legal services training presentations in the areas of mobile home park law, landlord-tenant law, and federally-subsidized housing rights of recipients. Recreationally, Martin enjoys bicycling, running and watching soccer – especially the national team and far-away Glasgow Celtic. 

Courses Taught

• Case Planning & Discovery

Karen Richards is the poverty law project director at Vermont Legal – a position she has now held for over nine years. The Poverty Law Project provides legal services to income eligible clients in the areas of public benefits, housing, family (domestic violence), consumer and unemployment compensation. Vermont Legal Aid (VLA) is a statewide non-LSC program. PLP services are delivered by a team of 12 attorneys and two paralegals. Prior to coming to VLA, Karen was a staff attorney, specializing in housing, at Connecticut Legal Services in the Waterbury office.

Courses Taught

• Case Planning & Discovery