News & Updates

The issue of how to provide litigants with equal access to legal services, regardless of the litigant’s financial status, has plagued the legal community for some time now. One solution that is gaining popularity is unbundled legal services, where lawyers work on and charge clients for only those tasks that they agree to in advance.

We have never been busier at IAALS, with projects and convenings ramping up across all of our focus areas. To help facilitate this work and expand our impact nationwide, we are pleased to welcome three new staff members to our ranks. Jonna Perlinger joined IAALS in March as a legal assistant, and Michael Houlberg and Jason Zolle joined IAALS in June as managers.

For litigants without the help of an attorney, the American civil justice system can be difficult to understand—let alone navigate. In a recent piece for the ABA Journal, Chancellor Professor of Law Frederic I. Lederer proposed several technological advancements that can help improve access to legal resources and litigant understanding of the process.

Alternative dispute resolution processes, especially in the area of family law, are finally starting to become more common—yet still not common enough. IAALS piloted the Center for Out-of-Court Divorce (COCD) in Denver, and other programs, like the Hampshire Family Resolutions Specialty Court in Massachusetts, are also taking shape across the country.

Bill came to IAALS as a representative of the American Association for Justice. I think initially he was a bit skeptical about our work and our mission. Over time, Bill has become a friend and a trusted colleague. He is entrepreneurial, visionary, and practical. We thank Bill for his artful purpose and for his collegiality.

As part of our three-year project to support the modernization and transformation of civil litigation in our state courts, IAALS has helped facilitate a series of regional strategic planning summits to help states develop an action plan for reform or other activities in their respective jurisdictions.

A recent study revealed that a high percentage of women still leave major financial and investment decisions to their spouse. This trend is becoming a problem for widowed and divorced women, 59 percent of whom wish they had taken a bigger role in financial planning when they were in a couple. Because the divorce rate has doubled for those over 50 in the last few decades, and because women have longer life expectancies than men, the lack of financial planning awareness can hurt older women more as they separate from their spouses.

The National Self-Represented Litigants Project (NSRLP) recently published a paper that looks at costs awards to self-represented litigants (SRLs) in Canadian courts. The paper notes the leading Canadian cases in which SRLs have been ordered costs awards and analyzes the development of these principles in family law matters. Generally, the report concludes that Canadian courts have broadened SRLs’ ability to obtain costs. 

Law school clinics are often said to serve two goals. They are a place where law students can develop and practice their legal skills in a real setting, with the safety net of faculty supervision. They also aim to serve low and modest means clients whose legal needs might otherwise go unmet. And, according to a recent study, clinics are achieving these goals.

The ABA Center for Innovation launched a new project in April that will provide legal aid organizations with free technology that will hopefully make them more efficient and able to help more clients. The project, called "Legal Tech for a Change,” will allow the Center for Innovation to serve as a broker between legal aid organization grantees and established legal technology companies. The Center will also vet potential technology solutions.

Tony is one of a kind. He sees the big picture and can envision unique solutions to old problems. His enthusiasm and ideas are boundless, and he knits them all together and is able to see causes and effects. And, of course, he is incredibly tech-savvy. He is connected, internationally, to the innovators in law and delivery of legal services. With Tony in our midst, we can expand the reach and possibilities of IAALS’ impact exponentially.

Much has been done over the past five years to address the cost and delay in the civil justice process, and much of that work has focused on discovery. Recognizing that there are equal challenges and opportunities for improvement in the area of motions practice, IAALS has focused on understanding the current motions landscape and issuing recommendations for improvement. In this effort, IAALS has released a new report intended to spark a national conversation about the current challenges of summary judgment.

The Young Lawyer Editorial Board of The American Lawyer recently called out a growing disconnect between the skills and training law students are receiving and the tasks new lawyers are asked to complete in practice. For example, new lawyers today are often asked to manage both teams and deadline schedules, and also to take the lead on important documents and matters early in their careers. However, today’s typical law school curriculum does not always cover all these important areas.

Denmark has been known for allowing quick access to many official documents and services online, including $60 online divorces within a week. But starting next year, Danish couples with kids who want to get a divorce will have to undergo a three-month “reflection period” with free counseling before they can officially divorce. Couples without children and couples where abuse is present can still opt for the faster divorce process.

The Colorado Supreme Court’s Attorney Regulation Counsel recently released statistics on the state’s legal employment, which revealed an interesting trend. According to the Denver Business Journal, the study found that fewer than half of the 1,473 active female attorneys younger than 30 years old are working in law firms of any size, and only 20 percent of female attorneys in that age range went to work for big law firms. At the same time, law school classes around the country are fairly equally divided between male and female students, on average.

IAALS’ own Natalie Knowlton was recently interviewed for a Chicago Tribune advice column for self-represented litigants about the problems they face and the tools available that can help increase access to justice for those navigating the legal system without a lawyer.

In the last blog, we explained that the 77 foundations survey respondents identified as being necessary for new lawyers in the short term are largely consistent and definitive across respondents. Still, there were a few differences that highlight foundations some practice settings emphasize over others. Similarly, when we focused on private practice, we discovered only slight variations among different law firm sizes. In this blog, we explore the foundations that make up the whole lawyer for each private practice firm size category, and the differences as compared with one another and the whole lawyer overall.

Changes in recent years to California’s budget, priorities, and policies have resulted in a focus on criminal over civil matters. In the yearly State of the Judiciary address, however, California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye highlighted some of the ways California is planning to improve access to justice in its courts. Among them: better meeting the needs of self-represented litigants.

America’s civil justice system is failing to deliver on the promise of a just, speedy, and inexpensive resolution in every case. However, by taking charge of cases from their beginning to end, courts have the power to change that. IAALS’ latest report, Redefining Case Management, offers strategies to help the courts take charge of the delivery of justice in response to the changing landscape in our courts.

In our previous blog, we explained that the 77 foundations survey respondents identified as being necessary for new lawyers immediately upon graduation from law school are consistent and definitive throughout the practice of law. The similarities we saw in responses across demographics, firm sizes, and practice-specific characteristics suggest that the findings can be employed with confidence by law schools, the profession, employers, and others to facilitate the development of crucial foundations needed by lawyers right out of law school. Nonetheless, there were a few notable practically significant differences that arose among the various practice settings we studied.