The Resource
for Great Programs
and
IOLTA
Information Services
3055 Cass Road,
Suite 102-B
Traverse City, MI 49684
Phone 231-947-3280
Fax 231-947-5734
Web site
maintained by
The Resource
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Workshop Leaders
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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 |
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(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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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
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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.
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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 isrecognized 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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