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
(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.
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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. 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, 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 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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