THE LEGAL AID SOCIETY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Chief
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Chief Attorney, Civil Practice
- Member of the New York State Permanent Commission on Access to Justice
Adriene serves as Chief Attorney of the Civil Practice of The Legal Aid Society and has devoted her entire professional career to challenging poverty and racial injustice for the advancement of equity. Adriene is responsible for managing the provision of comprehensive civil legal services through a network of neighborhood offices and specialized city-wide units serving all five boroughs of New York City with over 500 staff working on more than 50,000 cases each year. Prior to her appointment to Chief Attorney of the Civil Practice, Adriene served as Attorney-in-Charge of the Harlem Office; practiced law as a staff attorney in the Law Reform Unit of the Civil Practice; and began her career as a staff attorney in the Harlem Office Housing Law Unit.
In addition to her formal duties, Adriene also serves as a member of the New York State Permanent Commission on Access to Justice, serves on the New York State Bar Association House of Delegates, is a member of the New York State Bar Association President's Committee on Access to Justice, is an executive board member for Housing Court Answers, and previously served as a Tenant Representative on the New York City Rent Guidelines Board. Adriene has also served as an adjunct professor at The New School and as a volunteer instructor at Columbia Law School.
Often called upon to work on the Society's legislative agenda, Adriene frequently testifies before legislative bodies on the city and state levels. She also is consulted on various legal and policy matters impacting low-income communities by the media, law schools, and policy or governmental agencies.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Officers Team
- President
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Chief Human Resources Officer
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Chief Human Resources Officer of the Legal Aid Society of NYC
As the Chief Human Resources Officer of the Legal Aid Society of NYC, Connie Park leads a team of Human Resources professionals dedicated to retaining, recruiting, and supporting the people who deliver on the mission for justice in every borough.
Prior to joining the Legal Aid Society of NYC, Connie Park served as the Executive Director of Human Resources, Chief Diversity Officer, and Title IX Coordinator at SUNY Corning Community College for five years. Her past professional experiences also include 15 years in a variety of roles in Human Resources at Cornell University and she has worked within the non-profit sector in New York City providing direct human services to individuals who experience chronic homelessness.
She holds her masters from Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations and a bachelor's in Political Science from the University of Maryland.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Member of the Officers Team
- Treasurer
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Chief
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Chief Attorney, Juvenile Rights Practice
- Law Intern to Chief
From law intern to Chief Attorney. Dawne's career at the Legal Aid Society spans more than 20 years and it speaks volumes for her commitment to justice for New Yorkers and particularly for its most vulnerable community - New York City's children.
As an integral leader at the Society, Dawne's comprehensive knowledge of all aspects of the Juvenile Rights Practice, transformational management style, strategic business acumen, litigation expertise, creativity, and perseverance, she oversees the operations and delivery of services for more than 34,000 clients each year.
With a team of more than 350 staff attorneys, social workers, paralegal, investigators, support staff and volunteers on the front lines- Dawne ensures comprehensive direct legal representation to children and youth in child welfare and juvenile justice matters. Dawne's dedicated focus on empowering children and families has led to fundamental advancements in the practice -her leadership has sought to challenge and impact the racial disparities and systemic issues that have led to the poor outcomes for children, disruption of families, limited educational advancement of youth in care, and a burdened system of care for children and families for generations.
Dawne was appointed to serve on the NYS Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Children, the First Department Advisory Committee, and is a member of several New York City Bar Association committees and workgroups. Dawne's collaborative work with leaders across the City and State continues to build on stronger and more conscientious child-centered policy and best practices.
From law intern to Chief Attorney, Dawne's career at The Legal Aid Society spans more than 20 years and it speaks volumes for her commitment to justice for New Yorkers and particularly for its most vulnerable community - New York City's children.
As an integral leader at the Society, Dawne's comprehensive knowledge of all aspects of the Juvenile Rights Practice, transformational management style, strategic business acumen, litigation expertise, creativity and perseverance, oversees the operations and delivery of services for more than 34,000 clients each year.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Member of the Board of Directors
Job Titles:
- Chief Operating Officer
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Member of the Officers Team
- Chief Operating Officer / Administration
- Chief Operating Officer / Chair of the Board of Directors
As Chief Operating Officer, Lauren oversees essential administrative functions of the organization, including Finance, Strategic Operations, Human Resources, Facilities, and Information Technology.
Lauren has dedicated her career to developing and implementing programs that serve and support New Yorkers. She joins the Legal Aid Society with extensive experience in operations, strategic planning, and implementation in the public and non-profit sectors. She spent the last eight years in a variety of roles at the NYC Department of Education, most recently as their Chief Administrative Officer where she oversaw the Finance, Human Resources, Information Technology, Labor, and Legal teams. A member of the Chancellor's senior leadership team, Lauren supervised prioritization and planning for the Department's more than $30 billion budget and helped to manage the Department's responses to critical emergencies.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Lauren led the strategy and implementation of a project that brought 500,000 LTE-enabled devices to students so they could access remote learning. She also oversaw a doubling of the size of the Department's pool of substitutes and expanded teacher pipeline programs.
Lauren served as the Department of Education's lead on the construction of the Brooklyn STEAM Center in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a career and technical training hub that offers high school students a range of career pathways, including design and engineering, computer science and IT, and film and media. As part of this effort, Lauren coordinated across legal, facilities, safety, and information technology teams to ensure the successful build-out of this innovative learning center.
Job Titles:
- Director, Learning & Development / Administration
Job Titles:
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Chief Facilities and Administration Officer
Job Titles:
- Chief Counsel of the Pro Bono Practice
- Chief Counsel, Pro Bono Practi / Administration
- Member of the New York State Bar Association 's Pro Bono Coordinators Network
Lou serves as Chief Counsel of the Pro Bono Practice at The Legal Aid Society where he is responsible for the recruitment, administration, and coordination of nearly 3,000 volunteers annually. Working closely with Legal Aid staff in every practice and borough, Lou has implemented pro bono projects serving disinvested clients and communities including, trafficking survivors, senior citizens, court-involved youth, immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, residents of public housing, and the accused and incarcerated. Driving systemic change through impact litigation, the Pro Bono Practice partners Legal Aid law reform advocates with law firms to co-counsel matters impacting thousands of New Yorkers every day.
Lou is a member of the New York State Bar Association's Pro Bono Coordinators Network, The Public Interest Pro Bono Association, and the New York City Bar Association Committee on Pro Bono and Legal Services. A frequent presenter at the ABA-NLADA Equal Justice Conference and other national conferences, Lou has also chaired the annual Practicing Law Institute's Ethical Issues in Pro Bono program. Lou has been recognized by City & State with the "2017 Responsible 100 Award" as one of New York's 100 most outstanding corporate citizens.
Prior to joining the Pro Bono Practice, Lou served as Attorney-in-Charge of Legal Aid's Manhattan and Staten Island Juvenile Rights offices, supervising staff representing thousands of court-involved youth and oversaw the initiation of programs focusing on literacy and the needs of adolescents transitioning from foster care. Prior to joining Legal Aid in 1989, Lou completed a clerkship in the Superior Court of New Jersey. Lou has held senior staff attorney positions in both the Juvenile Rights and Criminal Defense practices. In addition, he has worked in private practice focusing on employee benefits and as a Senior Attorney with Brooklyn Defender Services. Lou previously sat on the NYS Supreme Court First Department Family Court Advisory Committee and was an Adjunct Professor in the Trial Advocacy program at St. John's University School of Law.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Chief Counsel, Pro Bono Practice
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Development Mgr / Administration
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Data Analyst / Administration
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Manager Systems Administration / Administration
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- Director - Internal Audit / Administration
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Facilities Supervisor / Administration
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- Grants and Contracts Analyst / Administration
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Director of Media Relations
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- Member of the Board of Directors
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- General Counsel
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Member of the Officers Team
- Secretary
Scott has served as the General Counsel of The Legal Aid Society since 2011. Mr. Rosenberg is responsible for overseeing all legal matters in which the Society is the principal, including compliance with federal, state, and local laws, and not-for-profit governance and regulation. He plays a key role in the negotiation and enforcement of contracts; audits; real estate transactions and lease compliance as well as coordinates the involvement of outside counsel in legal matters where the Society is a principal.
Job Titles:
- Director of Payroll and AP / Administration
Job Titles:
- Chief Information Officer
- Leader
- Member of the Leadership Team
Surya oversees data and technology at The Legal Aid Society, including strategy, planning, advocacy, support, training and staffing across application development and data, infrastructure and user experience teams. Across our practices, the role of technology and data is ever more critical to support our social workers, paralegals, attorneys, investigators and most importantly, to better serve the vulnerable individuals, families and children we work for.
Before joining The Legal Aid Society, Surya worked with The World Bank, helping its grantees build digital capacity on projects addressing poverty, refugee rights, and reproductive health. He has led professional services teams and in-house technology and data practices at domestic and international nonprofits, including leading information services at The Asia Foundation, across 18 countries in developing Asia. Before moving into the nonprofit sector he was founder and CTO of a security software startup. After graduating from the dot com space, he worked to design grassroots technology for low-resource settings. One example is a store-and-forward wireless mesh network that employed a mule later upgraded to a Vespa, solar power and wireless tablets to enable communications and medical diagnostics at a community health center in rural Costa Rica.
Surya is a change leader with deep experience in digital innovation and operational integration. He is recognized as a pioneer for his work at the intersection of governance, data, and access to justice in international development. In 2014 he won the InsideNGO Operational Excellence award. Surya has a B.A. from Whitman College and a J.D. from New York University. He holds MCSD, CISSP & PMD-Pro certifications, and serves on the board of CIO4Good.
Job Titles:
- Associate HR Business Partner / Administration
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Chief
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Chief Attorney, Criminal Defense Practice
Tina has served as the Chief Attorney of the Criminal Defense Practice since 2014 where they are responsible for the daily operation of all of the practice's trial, appellate, post-conviction, law reform and parole defense work conducted on behalf of over 200,000 clients. They lead a citywide team of 12 senior managers who, in turn, manage the practice's over 1100 staff. Prior to the appointment as the organization's chief defender, they served as the Deputy Attorney-in-Charge of the Criminal Defense Practice. They began their Legal Aid career in September 2002 as a staff attorney in the New York County trial office of the Criminal Defense Practice and was promoted to Supervising Attorney in the same office in 2007 where they continued to directly represent clients, as well as train and manage their team of attorneys, paralegals and investigators.
Prior to joining the Society, Tina served as Vice President of Operations for the National Council for Unity, a nonprofit organization implementing gang intervention/prevention programs in New York City schools and Boys and Girls Clubs of America. There, they spent over a decade in charge of the organization's financial, development, communication and human resource staff. In that role, they negotiated and managed the organization's city, state and private funding and was the organization's liaison with the Department of Education, Department of Youth and Community Development, United Federation of Teachers and Council of Supervisors and Administrators.
In their current role, Tina happily dedicates much of their time working on ways to create best practices within the Society. They play an active role in the development of the Criminal Defense Practice's training programs, networks across the country with other criminal justice leaders on ways to improve the overall public defender profession and plays a key role in many of this City's criminal justice reform initiative. They are the President-Elect of the Chief Defender Association of New York, former Chair of the American Bar Associations' Task Force of Comprehensive Representation, Steering Committee Member of the National Association for Public Defense, member of the American Bar Association Criminal Justice Council and member of the New York State Bar Association Committee of Quality Mandated Representation.
Tina has served as the Chief Attorney of the Criminal Defense Practice at The Legal Aid Society since 2014 where they are responsible for the daily operation of all of the practice's trial, appellate, post-conviction, law reform and parole defense work conducted on behalf of over 200,000 clients. They lead a citywide team of 12 senior managers who, in turn, manage the practice's over 1100 staff.
Job Titles:
- Chief Executive Officer
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Member of the Officers Team
- Attorney - in - Chief / CEO
- Attorney - in - Chief and Chief Executive Officer
Twyla Carter (she/her) serves as the Attorney-in-Chief and Chief Executive Officer of The Legal Aid Society, becoming the first Black woman and first Asian American to lead the organization in its 145-year history.
Prior to joining Legal Aid, Carter was the National Director of Legal and Policy at The Bail Project (TBP), a national nonprofit organization that pioneered a national movement to bring free bail assistance and pretrial support to thousands of low-income people every year. At TBP, Carter created the department's strategic mission and directed the legal, policy, and advocacy efforts at the federal, state, and local levels. After over 22,000 bailouts over nearly 5 years, and with 90% of their clients returning to court, The Bail Project's model has proven that the nation's wealth-based pretrial detention system is broken.
Carter has also served as a senior staff attorney in the Criminal Law Reform Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) national office, where she litigated local and state bail inequities and right-to-counsel protections in the federal courts and designed alternative bail and representation policies and procedures for targeted jurisdictions. In this role, Carter litigated Booth v. Galveston County, a pretrial bail case in Texas, where the magistrate court held that people accused of crimes have a right to counsel in initial bail hearings under the Sixth Amendment, one of the only jurisdictions in the nation to guarantee legal representation at this critical stage of trial.
At the ACLU, Carter was also co- or lead counsel in the following class action lawsuits: Bairefoot v. Beaufort, a right-to-counsel case in South Carolina; Mock v. Glynn County, a pretrial bail case in Georgia; White v. Hesse, a pretrial bail case in Oklahoma that alleged violations under the American Disabilities Act and Rehabilitation Act; Allison et al. v. Allen et al., a pretrial bail case in Alamance County, North Carolina, and Ross v. 36th District Court, a pretrial bail and right-to-counsel case in Detroit, Michigan, the fifth busiest court in the country.
Prior to working at the ACLU, Carter was a public defender for ten years. She was the Misdemeanor Practice Director for the King County Department of Public Defense in Seattle, where she oversaw all misdemeanor casework across the four divisions of the department. As a Staff Attorney at The Defender Association, Carter handled felony and misdemeanor trial caseloads, represented juveniles, and appealed misdemeanor convictions. She won a published decision from the Washington State Court of Appeals, Division One, in State v. Green, which affirmed the due process rights of parents accused of trespassing in public schools.
Against the backdrop of the legislative attacks against the teaching of white supremacy and anti-Black racism in schools, Carter serves as Vice President of the Board of Directors of The Who We Are Project. Founded by Jeffery Robinson, a renowned expert on the role of racism in the criminal legal system, the project aims to correct the social, legal, political, and economic aspects of racism in the United States through educational materials, including through a feature-length documentary entitled Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America. She also serves as a board member for the NAPD Fund for Justice. The goal of the Fund is to enhance the right to counsel through public defense in the United States.
Carter is admitted to practice law in New York, Washington State, and numerous federal courts. She is a nationally recognized expert on bail reform and is a frequent speaker on all aspects of the criminal legal system, including police reform, right-to-counsel issues, and how to incorporate race and culture into criminal, death penalty, and civil cases. Carter received an associate degree from Seattle Central Community College, a bachelor's degree from Seattle University, summa cum laude, and a J.D. from the Seattle University School of Law.
Job Titles:
- Chief Communications Officer
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Chief Communications Officer Leading the Organization
- Chief Communications Officer With the Mandate to Lead the Organization
Vincent Paolo Villano joined The Legal Aid Society in October of 2021 as Chief Communications Officer leading the organization's media, content, marketing, and branding strategy. He joins Legal Aid with over a decade of experience in government, campaigns, and advocacy using communications to advance racial, social, and economic justice.
At the NYC Commission on Human Rights, a civil rights law enforcement agency, Vincent oversaw media strategy on groundbreaking actions, including the landmark settlement with Fox News Network for sexual harassment. He also helped coordinate the citywide response to the increase in anti-Asian bias incidents connected to COVID-19. With renowned artist Amanda Phingbodhippakiya, Vincent launched "I Still Believe in Our City," an art series to combat anti-Asian stigma. The artworks spread to protests throughout the U.S., landed on the cover of Time, and became the Commission's largest campaign ever.
At the NYC Civilian Complaint Review Board, the watchdog agency of the NYPD, Vincent oversaw communications in the administrative trial of the officer who killed Eric Garner. He also had a key role in the Board's first-ever youth summit on policing, amplifying the voices of young New Yorkers on improving transparency and accountability in policing.
As part of his work at Hillary for America, Vincent led the Digital Voter Protection Hotline, which provided real-time support to voters facing irregularities at their poll site.
Vincent got his start in advocacy at the youth organizing arm of the Center for American Progress, fighting for health care access, immigration reform, and college affordability. At the National Center for Transgender Equality, Vincent led communications on the 2015 U.S. Trans Survey, which remains the most comprehensive study on transgender, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people's experiences with discrimination.
Vincent Paolo Villano joined The Legal Aid Society in October of 2021 as Chief Communications Officer with the mandate to lead the organization's media, content, marketing, and branding strategy. He joins Legal Aid with over a decade of experience in government, campaigns, and advocacy using communications to advance racial, social, and economic justice.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Board of Directors
- Member of the Officers Team