Workshop Leaders

Ken Smith, President of The Resource, has over 20 years' experience in the design and application of outcome measures for civil justice programs, including the IOLTA reporting systems currently in place in New York, Florida, Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania and several other states, and the Matters Statistical Report

(MSR) recently implemented by the Legal Services Corporation. For the past decade he has developed innovative ways of applying outcomes and service information for telling the compelling story of how legal aid programs change lives and benefit communities.

Recently he has worked with other national leaders including John Tull, Martha Bergmark, John Scanlon, Wayne Moore and Judy Garlow, pioneering the use of simple, affordable tools for "Program-Owned" evaluation by civil justice managers to improve program results and expand funding.

   

Alex Gulotta, Executive Director of the Legal Aid Justice Center in Virginia, completed in 2003 a successful $2 million capital campaign in which the donor base of his program has grown from a handful to over a thousand in just three years.

He has been extraordinarily successful in securing funding for service delivery projects with the result that his totally non-federally funded program has grown to more than $2 million in annual funding while earning widespread respect as a high quality, hard-hitting law firm for the poor. In 2001, while many programs were shrinking, the Legal Aid Justice Center opened satellite offices in Richmond, Petersburg and Northern Virginia, thereby expanding access to unrestricted legal services for additional thousands of low-income Virginians. In 2003, Alex was the recipient of the prestigious Charles Dorsey Award from NLADA.

David Smith, Vice President of The Resource, has worked with a broad array of public and private sector organizations during his 14 years as a consultant. He has extensive experience leading joint consulting/client teams in strategic planning, performance improvement,

and organizational transformation efforts, working primarily with large health care organizations, government agencies, and community-based legal aid and health care delivery programs. He has developed in-depth expertise in assisting clients in understanding and instilling best practices in leadership and service delivery, becoming mission-driven organizations, and developing organizational strategies designed to promote dynamic improvements in performance.

Susan Lucas has been the owner and principal of Susan J. Lucas Consulting Services, located in Erie Pennsylvania, since 1993, and has been an affiliate of The Resource since 1999. Susan provides program assessment services to state legal services systems in furtherance of strategic planning and

marketing of legal services programs. She has served as a proposal reviewer for the Legal Services Corporation's grant competition process; her completed proposal evaluation has been selected by LSC to publish as their model in their Reader's Guide.

She has also worked extensively with Pennsylvania Legal Services (PLS), a legal services state support entity, and with the legal services programs within the Pennsylvania Legal Aid Network, serving as Team Leader of state support peer review teams; recruiting team participants; designing instruments for use in the review process; and preparing narrative reports for funders. She facilitated the statewide transition to a new case management systems software application, overseeing customization and data conversion, developing the plan for implementation, and providing training to the staffs of the Pennsylvania legal services programs.

   

Other leaders will be announced...Check back on this page as plans for the workshops develop. Past leaders have included the following:

Neil McBride, Director of Litigation for Legal Services of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands, is one of the country's leading practitioners of legal aid program level evaluation. He has personally performed on-site evaluations of more than 55 programs, and done case reviews with hundreds of lawyers. Neil has developed breakthrough methods for assessing quality of advocacy as a tool for maximizing the results that a law firm is achieving for its clients. These range from internal peer reviews of every advocate's cases to interview-based program evaluations and reviews of the case statistics produced by a program's case management system. The purposes of evaluation that he promotes are all about maximizing the benefits produced for clients and creating an expectation of continuous improvement in legal services advocacy. His articles on management, program evaluation and delivery system innovation (for example, "active intake") have appeared in Management Information Exchange Journal, Clearinghouse Review and other national publications.

Bob Clyde, executive director of Ohio Legal Assistance Foundation, has been a major force in lobbying the legislature and working with banks to keep state funding and IOLTA revenues at the highest possible levels through the ebbs and flows of the economic and political environment. He has used program evaluation as a major tool for improving the quality of programs and demonstrating accountability to the stakeholders whose support he is seeking. When Bob came on board, IOLTA and filing fees were producing $3 million annually. Today that figure has grown to $16 million, a five-fold increase. Joe Tafelsky, the executive director of Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE) in Northwest Ohio, gives Bob much of the credit for this growth. "Bob has been our key strategist," he says. "He has great skills for analyzing the political landscape, and a strong vision of what legal services should be. We're very lucky to have his leadership."

Paul Doyle has extensive experience as a legal services program director and IOLTA executive. As Director of Legal Assistance Grants for The Florida Bar Foundation, he has designed and operated one of the nation's leading state-based systems for assessing performance and providing follow-up program improvement support to legal services provider organizations. He has published numerous articles and spoken extensively on legal services program evaluation and is recognized nationally as a leader in legal services grantmaking and oversight.

John Tull is the principal of John Tull Associates and one of the nation's leading legal services evaluation consultants. John is former director of the Legal Services Corporation's Office of Program Operations and principal drafter of the American Bar Association's Standards for Providers of Civil Legal Services for the Poor. He worked with Ken Smith and John Scanlon to develop the Evaluation Toolkit for the California Equal Access Fund, and was the principal consultant for developing the evaluation tools now being distributed by MIE's Technology Evaluation Project.

 

 

 
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