• Image of John Montgomery
    John Montgomery
  • Image of Heather
    Heather Buchanan
November 9, 2018
For years, law school graduates have struggled to find full-time employment, facing a highly saturated, fiercely competitive job market. There continues to be a gap between what law schools teach and what legal employers expect from new graduates—and not enough traditional law firm positions to hire them all.
  • Image of Heather
    Heather Buchanan
November 8, 2018
Although the idea of equal protection under the law has long been at the heart of the American legal system, equal access to justice is still not a reality for many people. Former American Bar Association President Robert J. Grey Jr. discusses this equal justice gap in a recent piece for the ABA Journal.
  • Image of Brittany Kauffman
    Brittany Kauffman
November 6, 2018
This week IAALS is cohosting the first in a series of webinars with NCSC focused on providing practical information and guidance on implementing civil justice reform. The webinars are part of our three-year Civil Justice Initiative implementation project focused on providing support for on-the-ground reform.
  • Image of Zachariah DeMeola
    Zachariah DeMeola
November 1, 2018
Since publishing the results of our Foundations for Practice survey, we have been using those results in the second phase of the project to work with select law schools to develop a set of learning outcomes, assessments, instructional designs, and hiring tools to instill and identify desired characteristics, competencies, and skills in future lawyers.
  • Image of Rebecca Love Kourlis
    Rebecca Love Kourlis
October 31, 2018
Camille was recommended to us as a star in legal academia—an innovator and a visionary. She has the capacity to open minds and eyes to a different perspective, while still finding common ground. We are so lucky to have her amongst us.
  • Image of John M. Greacen
    John M. Greacen
October 30, 2018
Courts are—to a great extent—in the business of customer service. A new IAALS report, Eighteen Ways Courts Should Use Technology to Better Serve Their Customers, provides a path forward to help courts use existing technologies to improve the user experience, particularly for those people who choose to represent themselves.
  • head shot photo of Michael Houlberg
    Michael Houlberg
October 26, 2018
The family justice system was built on the assumption that litigants would be represented by lawyers, but that assumption no longer holds true. It is no secret among lawyers, court staff, and judges—if not the general population itself—that more and more people are representing themselves through their divorce process, instead of hiring an attorney.
  • Image of Rebecca Love Kourlis
    Rebecca Love Kourlis
October 22, 2018
Karen Mathis is leaving IAALS at the end of this month. Karen has been the Associate Executive Director of IAALS since 2012, and prior to that, she served on IAALS’ Board of Advisors. Under her guidance, IAALS has come of age.
  • Image of Natalie Anne Knowlton
    Natalie Anne Knowlton
October 17, 2018
A first of its kind study, this landscape report brings together national data from family cases that confirms what we have long known at IAALS: family courts must do more to focus on problem solving rather than rely on the traditional structure framed around an adversarial approach.
  • Image of Zachary Willis
    Zachary Willis
October 16, 2018
The road to recovery is arduous for disaster victims. For the increasing numbers of those victims who end up in court in an effort to recover damages, the process can be protracted and complex. Courts are quickly overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of the cases and these challenges quickly frustrate victims already struggling to rebuild. But even with a documented upswing in both the number and severity of natural disasters, it doesn’t have to be this way.
  • Image of Luz E. Herrera
    Luz E. Herrera
October 9, 2018
Legal services consumers want greater access to law and justice, and teaching unbundling—or limited scope representation—in law schools is necessary for new lawyers to develop the skills they need to operate in today’s changing legal services market.
  • head shot photo of Michael Houlberg
    Michael Houlberg
October 8, 2018
The IAALS Court Compass project is exploring streamlined and simplified solutions that help people through the divorce and separation process. After holding successful design sprints in Boston, Des Moines, and Raleigh, the Court Compass team is planning another design sprint in the Denver metro area.