Community Lawyering Training - Coming to Orlando!

Promoting an expansive view of a legal aid lawyer’s role, our Community Lawyering training underlines the importance of thinking beyond litigation in addressing the kind of major problems that too often face legal aid clients (while retaining litigation as a vital tool). Addressing the pressing issues of a recognizable case study, participants learn the multi-tactic tools of a successful advocacy campaign, including media and outreach skills, facilitative leadership, action research, targeted planning, campaign feasibility and power analysis. You will also explore the relationship between traditional lawyering and these other disciplines and how, as a lawyer, to contribute most effectively to broad based advocacy campaigns. ‘Tales from the trenches’ - stories of successful legal services partnerships with campaign based advocacy efforts - enrich this learning experience, and you'll have the oppoortunity to apply the learning to think about campaign based approaches to the advocacy challenges you face back home. 

[On post-Katrina FEMA difficulties] "The concepts of Community Lawyering really put the pieces all together for me and showed me how to push (my) agenda forward."

- Raine Thompson, ACLU Jackson, Mississippi

Sept. 24-26, Orlando: Sign Me Up!

Join us for our first ever Florida delivery of Community Lawyering: Sept. 24-26, 2008, in Orlando.

Simply click here to register now

Faculty Information

Zenobia Lai, now a training attorney at CLAE, is one of the nation's most recognized community lawyering proponents. Her work with Boston's Chinatown community and its struggles to overcome gentrification and land grabs has been the subject of national media attention and are featured in Louder than Words: Lawyers, Communities and the Struggle for Justice, a seminal publication on the emerging discipline of community lawyering. Click here for a full bio.

Ross Dolloff, CLAE's National Training Director, previously served as Director of Neighborhood Legal Services in northeastern Massachusetts where his program served as a leading model for community lawyering approaches to legal services advocacy. He has written and taught extensively on the practice of community lawyering and on collaboration between organizing campaigns and legal advocacy approaches. Click here for a full bio.

More coming soon!

Sample Training Agenda

Here's how the three days of Community Lawyering typically break down (we also include timely breaks for beverages and snacks, as well as an hour's lunch or dinner):

DAY 1

2.30pm - 4.30: Welcome, Introduction and How We View our Communities

4.45 - 6.00: Community Understanding and Relationship Building

7.00 - 8.30: Community Lawyering in Your Region

DAY 2

8.30am - 9.00: What Community Lawyers Do

9.00 - 12.15: Choosing Issues, Power Mapping, Stakeholder Analysis

1.30 - 3.30: Identity and Difference

3.45 - 5.45: Community Organizing and Leadership

7.00 - 8.00pm: One-to-One exercise 

DAY 3

8.30am - 10.15: Communications and Public Policy Advocacy

10.15 - 1.00: Action Planning, Campaigning and Local Tactics

1.00 - 2.15: Carrying the Work Back Home

3.00 - 3.45pm: State Delegations discussion

For further Community Lawyering information, please click here.