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 graduate and undergraduate courses in negotiation, mediation and inclusive leadership at Emerson College, where she received the Alan L. Stanzler Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2018. Israela serves as the Ombuds for The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (since 2022), for faculty and staff at Wesleyan University (since 2017), and for faculty and staff at Clark University (since 2020). She is the author of the peer-reviewed piece, "Ombudsing with Neurodiversity in Mind", published in the International Ombuds Association Journal, Volume 17, Issue 2 (2024), and a contributing author to books including The Organizational Ombuds: Foundations, Fundamentals and its Future, International Ombuds Association Press, (2025), Mediation: A Practice Guide for Mediators, Lawyers, and Other Professionals, Mass. Continuing Legal Education Press (2013), and Pretrial Litigation Primer: Alternative Dispute Resolution, MCLE Press 2009, 2011.

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.

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