Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

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9:00am EDT

New Roles, New Skills: Building the Workforce the Justice System Needs

Thursday October 22, 2026 9:00am - 10:30am EDT

The justice system is inventing new roles and working faster than ever to train, supervise, fund, and sustain the people who will fill these roles.
Justice coordinators in New York. Court navigators in Illinois and Kansas. Community justice workers in Arizona and Utah. Legal paraprofessionals authorized under new regulatory frameworks. The titles vary but the pattern is the same: jurisdictions are recognizing that lawyers alone cannot close the justice gap, and they're creating new categories of professionals to do work that didn't have a job description five years ago.
The problem is that identifying a new role is the easy part. Building the infrastructure to make that role effective — training curricula, supervision models, career pathways, sustainable funding — is where most efforts encounter barriers.
This session is structured around three questions that every jurisdiction building new roles will eventually face. First: what roles are actually emerging, and what do they do? A landscape scan cuts through the terminology confusion — justice coordinator, navigator, community justice worker, paraprofessional — to show what these roles look like in practice across states, where they overlap, and where they're genuinely different. Second: how do you train people for roles that didn't exist before? A statewide training center model shows how one state built the infrastructure to develop multi-disciplinary justice professionals at scale — including the curriculum design challenges of training people whose backgrounds span social work, community organizing, and legal services. Third: how do you sustain them? An honest conversation about what happens after the grant ends, how you build career pathways for roles that most HR systems don't have a classification for, and how you prevent burnout in positions that carry enormous emotional weight with limited institutional support.
Participants will design a role their jurisdiction needs but doesn't have. A workshop template walks through the specifics: What's the unmet need? What would this person actually do? What skills and training do they need? Who supervises them? Where does the funding come from? What does success look like — and how would you know if the role isn't working? Table groups pressure-test each other's designs for feasibility.
A training needs assessment matrix helps participants evaluate their existing staff in new or evolving roles: What skills do they have? What do they need? Where's the single biggest gap?
You'll leave with a role design template, a training needs matrix, program documentation from states that have built these roles, and a comparison chart that clarifies the differences between the emerging workforce models — so you can explain to your court leadership or board exactly what you're proposing and why.

Speakers

Lisa M. Zayas

Director, Access to Justice Division, NYS Unified Courts Office for Justice Initiatives

Lisa M. Zayas, Esq. serves as the Access to Justice Division Director in the New York State Unified Court System’s Office for Justice Initiatives. Throughout her career, she has been deeply committed to advancing social justice and expanding access to justice for unrepresented court... Read More →

Antonio M. Coronado

Professor of Practice, Community Legal Education, I4J Innovations for Justice

Antonio M. Coronado (they/them/elle) is Professor of Practice and Co-Coordinator of Community Legal Education Programs at Innovation for Justice, housed at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law and the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business. Antonio... Read More →

Randy Bowens

New York Courts

Melissa Lahey

New York Courts

Melissa Lahey serves as Justice Coordinator for the Appellate Division, Third Department in the New York State Unified Court System where she focuses on advancing access to justice, particularly in rural communities. She works on initiatives related to civic education, community outreach... Read More →

Robert E. West

New York Courts

Robert West serves as the Justice Coordinator for the Criminal Court of the City of New York, the largest and busiest criminal court in the United States. In this role, he focuses on advancing the mission of the New York State Unified Court System and the Office for Justice Initiatives... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 9:00am - 10:30am EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Policy

10:45am EDT

The Price of Justice: Reducing Financial Barriers to Court Access

Thursday October 22, 2026 10:45am - 12:15pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

The cumulative financial burden of participating in the civil justice system is substantial and varies widely across jurisdictions. Participants in the court system are often responsible for many costs, such as filing fees, service of process, answer fees, transcript fees, and more, even without the additional cost of hiring an attorney. While fee waiver processes exist to ensure that all litigants, regardless of income, are able to access justice, the process can be so confusing and/or burdensome that many eligible people never use it.
One of the first barriers that litigants face is a lack of information about 1) the existence of fee waivers and 2) the eligibility requirements that must be met in order to receive a waiver, including what information a litigant needs to provide. This session will open with an interactive exercise designed to identify these issues, allowing participants to see, from the perspective of a court user, the information that is (and is not) available to them.
Next, participants will hear from national experts about best practices for fee waivers, including the kinds of information and tools that can help court users understand how to request a waiver, and the kinds of processes and tools that can help courts resolve waiver requests efficiently.
Finally, panelists with hands-on experience in administering fee waivers and/or working to reform fee waiver processes will share their specific perspectives and experiences. Participants will hear, for example, from clerks about their experiences helping court users navigate fee waiver applications, the problems they identified, and the solution they've adopted. And they will hear how other states and counties have examined their fee waiver systems and proposed changes. Participants will leave the session with an understanding of general fee waiver best practices and real-life examples of those best practices in action.

Speakers

Hannah Makowske

National Center for State Courts

Hannah Makowske is a Court Management Consultant with the National Center for State Courts. Her recent work at NCSC includes a report on national trends and best practices regarding fee waivers. Prior to joining NCSC, Hannah was a staff law clerk at the United States Court of Appeals... Read More →

Josh Butz

National Center for State Courts

Joshua Butz, MPA is a Court Management Consultant with the National Center for State Courts. As a part of the Access to Justice Program, Joshua works with self-help resources, court navigator programs, accessible forms and webtools, regulatory reform, technology solutions, and several... Read More →

Katie Dilks

Executive Director, Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation

Lisa Foster

Co-Executive Director, Fines and Fees Justice Center

Lisa Foster is the Co-Executive Director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending the unjust and harmful imposition of fines and fees in the criminal legal system. A retired judge, Lisa is also the former director of the Office for Access to Justice... Read More →

Michael Roth

Davidson County Juvenile Court

LaTonya Jones

Thursday October 22, 2026 10:45am - 12:15pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Policy

1:30pm EDT

Stop Reinventing the Wheel: Using Design Principles, Open Source, and Shared Infrastructure to Spread Innovations

Thursday October 22, 2026 1:30pm - 3:00pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

Many jurisdictions are building the same thing from scratch. The same guided interview tools, the same self-help website content, the same intake workflows, the same court form designs — developed independently by hundreds of organizations on their own. This session opens with a discussion about why is scaling innovations so hard in justice.
In response, panelists will introduce a set of design principles that can help identify the DNA of these innovations with the premise that focusing on these principles (instead of strict replication) will accelerate their uptake and spread. Shared infrastructure can also accelerate innovation with panelists highlighting open-source document assembly platforms that already allow jurisdictions to adapt rather than rebuild, shared website platforms that provide common architecture while allowing local customization, and an emerging vision for a justice innovation commons where workflows, taxonomies, and evaluation protocols are shared across jurisdictions the way medical data standards transformed healthcare interoperability.
These aren't hypothetical — they're operating now, and the organizations behind them have learned hard lessons about what makes shared infrastructure succeed: documentation, modularity, governance, licensing, and the willingness to build for reuse rather than just for your own needs.
The session will then flip the conversation from the stage to the room. Through a structured, interactive "have/need" exchange, participants will not only have an opportunity to address real-world challenges they face; they'll also generate guidance for how national organizations and networks can spread innovations in ways that really work for those on the ground.

Speakers

Katya Fels Smyth

Full Frame Initiative

For over three decades, Katya Smyth has challenged assumptions and structures underlying American systems, including that scale and perpetuity are inherently valuable, and led organizations and alliances that offer a new way forward in fields including community development, human... Read More →

Quinten Steenhuis

Clinical Fellow, Suffolk LIT Lab's Document Assembly

Quinten Steenhuis is the co-director of the Suffolk University Law School’s Legal Innovation and Technology Lab and founder and CEO of Lemma Legal Consulting. At Suffolk, he leads the Document Assembly Line project that builds and maintains CourtFormsOnline.org. His work focuses... Read More →

Margaret D. Hagan

Executive Director, Legal Design Lab, Stanford Legal Design Lab

Margaret Hagan is the Executive Director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford University, as well as lecturer at the Law School and d.school. She is a lawyer, and holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a DPhil from Queen’s University Belfast, an MA from Central European University... Read More →

Sandy Ambrozy

SRLN Governance Leadership Team, Urban Institute

Sandra Ambrozy is a nonresident fellow for the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute in D.C. Previously, Ambrozy was a senior fellow and senior program officer at The Kresge Foundation, where she developed strategic and layered investments to address critical... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 1:30pm - 3:00pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Policy

Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

From $62.13

Tickets

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Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

9:00am EDT

Lisa M. Zayas

Antonio M. Coronado

Randy Bowens

Melissa Lahey

Robert E. West

10:45am EDT

Hannah Makowske

Josh Butz

Katie Dilks

Lisa Foster

Michael Roth

LaTonya Jones

1:30pm EDT

Katya Fels Smyth

Quinten Steenhuis

Margaret D. Hagan

Sandy Ambrozy

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