Loading…
← Back to schedule
New Roles, New Skills: Building the Workforce the Justice System Needs
Thursday October 22, 2026 9:00am - 10:30am EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center
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
avatar for Lisa M. Zayas

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 →
avatar for Antonio M. Coronado

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 →
RB

Randy Bowens

New York Courts
ML

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 →
avatar for Robert E. West

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

Sign up or log in to save this to your schedule, view media, leave feedback and see who's attending!

Tweet Share

Get help with the event

Contact event planner Event login
View support guides Find upcoming events
Create an event you'd love to attend!
Explore why organizers choose Sched • Success stories
Event App • Event scheduling • Event registration • Event ticketing • Sched forms • Call for papers • Badges • Conferences
© 2026. SCHED LLC - All rights reserved - Helping events since 2008
Event Planning App • Privacy • Terms
Share Modal

Share this link via

Or copy link