Israela Brill-Cass

Israela Adah Brill-Cass is an independent ombuds, attorney, mediator, facilitator and founder of fixerrr, through which she works to help others rethink, respond and resolve (the three r’s) conflict and to ask for what they need to succeed, and to provide outsourced conflict management, consulting, ombuds mediation and training services. She teaches courses in conflict resolution and mediation as well as inclusive leadership at Emerson College, where she received the Alan L. Stanzler Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2018. In 2017, she became Wesleyan University’s inaugural Ombuds, serving as a confidential, independent resource for faculty and staff, and in 2020 she became Clark University’s inaugural Ombuds as well. She also serves as the Ombuds for the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (as of 2022), where her interest in neurodiversity intensified and inspired her to write the peer-reviewed piece, "Ombudsing with Neurodiversity in Mind" published in the International Ombuds Association Journal, Volume 17, Issue 2 (2024), Special Issue on Diversity Equity Inclusion and Belonging. 

She has provided training in conflict skills, negotiation, effective leadership, healthy workplace communications and bias management, to organizations including the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Tufts Women in Medicine and Science, MIT, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Administrative Office of the Trial Court of Massachusetts and the American Bar Association.

Israela has been recognized as a New England Super Lawyer, a list published annually by Boston Magazine and Thompson-Reuters of lawyers viewed by their peers as being in the top 5% of the profession, and she was named one of the Top Women Attorneys in Massachusetts in 2013 and 2016. She has been interviewed as an authority for articles on conflict management, employment and work-related issues, mediation and negotiation in publications ranging from the American Bar Association Journal, the Family Mediation Quarterly and the BBC Capital and she is also a contributing author to the books, Mediation: A Practice Guide for Mediators, Lawyers, and Other Professionals (MCLE, Nov. 2013), and Pretrial Litigation Primer: Alternative Dispute Resolution (MCLE, 2009, 2011).

English was Israela's second language as she grew up speaking Romanian in her immigrant home and in 2002, she established the first federally-funded Agricultural Mediation Program in New England to help cranberry farmers in Massachusetts.