Supervision Skills for Equal Justice Providers

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

Vice President of Training Programs

Ellen Hemley brings over 30 years of experience in the equal justice community to her role as Vice President of Training Programs. Prior to joining the Shriver Center, Ellen served as executive director of the Center for Legal Aid Education, which provided training and leadership development programs to equal justice advocates nationally. Previously, Ellen was Director of Training at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute where, among other things, she oversaw CLAE's predecessor, the Legal Services Training Consortium of New England. She also served for many years as an independent consultant; her clients included the American Bar Association, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, the Florida Bar Foundation, the Washington Access to Justice Commission, the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, the Massachusetts Union of Public Housing Tenants, and scores of other legal aid networks, bar foundations and justice-related programs across the country.

Courses Taught

• 2006-2007 NE Leadership Institute
• 2008-2009 NE Leadership Institute
• 2009-2010 Florida Leadership Institute
• 2010-11 Florida Leadership Institute
• Affirmative Litigation
• Board Development
• Board Development - May
• Community Lawyering
• Community Legal Education
• Essential Skills for Hotline Supervisors
• Supervision Skills for Equal Justice Providers
• Supervision Skills: Difficult Conversations & Constructive Feedback
• Whole Client / Whole Advocate

David Cruickshank advises law and other professional services firms on practice management, leadership development and talent retention strategies. He works with professional development partners, departments and hiring partners to convert training to a strategic advantage of the firm.  David creates customized programs on time management, delegation, feedback and business development skills. He has worked as a training consultant in top 50 firms in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States since 1990. As a former law professor and practitioner in Canada, he became well known for the study and practice of skills such as negotiation, interviewing, drafting and effective communications. He teaches as an adjunct at the Pepperdine Law School master’s program and is a frequent conference speaker. David has most recently been Director of Professional Development at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison in New York. He has a master’s degree in law from Harvard Law School. His law degree and B.A. were earned at the University of Western Ontario. David lives in Manhattan and enjoys weekends of cycling, kayaking and running in upstate New York.

Courses Taught

• Designing and Delivering Great Training
• Designing and Delivering Great Training
• Supervision Skills for Equal Justice Providers

Zenobia Lai is a veteran legal services lawyer having spent more than fourteen years at Greater Boston Legal Services. She launched the Community Law Project in 2006 to further expand the community lawyering practice that emphasizes lawyers’ collaboration with community groups and other professionals to build grassroots capacity.  Prior to that, Zenobia spent more than a decade leading the Asian Outreach Unit that provides linguistically and culturally accessible legal services to limited-English-proficient Asian immigrants in Greater Boston.  She has practiced in the areas of land use, zoning, housing, immigration, disability, domestic violence and family law.

During her brief hiatus from legal services, Zenobia was the executive director of Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco.  She was also the Deputy Research Director of the New York-based Human Rights in China where she researched and compiled parallel reports to the UN on China’s progress in implementing two key international human rights covenants and wrote on legal reform and social justice issues in China.

Aside from practicing law, Zenobia serves on the boards of directors of various non-profit groups, runs a legal segment on a Cantonese cable television show in the Boston area and teaches part-time at University of Massachusetts – Boston.

Courses Taught

• 2008-2009 NE Leadership Institute
• 2009-2010 Florida Leadership Institute
• 2010-11 Florida Leadership Institute
• Administrative Hearing Skills
• Community Lawyering
• Essential Skills for Paralegals and Legal Assistants
• Negotiation Skills
• Negotiation Skills Online
• Supervision Skills for Equal Justice Providers
• Whole Client / Whole Advocate