Ross Dolloff
National Training Director
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."