News & Updates

It was the founders’ vision that we establish a more perfect union, with justice first and foremost in achieving that goal. To do this, we must rebuild our justice system to ensure that people’s needs are realized in an accessible, fair, equitable, and accountable way.

The American Bar Association Center for Innovation has released the inaugural issue of the Innovation Trends Report, which explores innovation within the ABA, in legal technology, and in legal regulatory reform.

A growing number of states are exploring the permanent implementation of alternative licensure approaches that would allow law school graduates to obtain their license through nontraditional avenues that run adjacent to—or bypass entirely—the bar exam.

Last week, IAALS gathered with our partners and friends for our 14th Annual Rebuilding Justice Award Dinner. We were thrilled to welcome people back in person after three years to celebrate this year’s honorees, as well as recognize our collective efforts to build a more accessible, fair, and efficient civil justice system.

This year, the ABA marks Law Day 2022 with the theme of "Toward a More Perfect Union: The Constitution in Times of Change." Today, we should reflect on the shortcomings of our justice system and worry about the threats to democracy and the rule of law. But we should also celebrate the strides that have been made and the promise ahead.

The challenges we face continue to upend our lives. But we cannot go back, so instead we must forge a better future. Our work in 2021, as described in our Annual Report, has moved the needle and opened new doors for those in need of justice.

IAALS is thrilled to announce that Dan Rodriguez, former dean and current Howard Washington Professor of Law of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, will join the organization as our scholar-in-residence for two weeks this year, with ongoing collaboration on our projects. 

Our final two Paths to Justice events, focused on racial justice, brought together diverse perspectives and partners to engage in a dialogue around inequities in our civil justice system and how it relates to public trust and confidence. IAALS has published two issue papers highlighting outcomes and key takeaways for the paths forward.

Over the past several years, IAALS has designed resources to improve legal education and legal hiring; challenged the legal community to examine its licensure practices; and promoted a justice system that meets the demands of everyday people by clearing regulatory obstacles to innovation, development, and collaboration. And this work is just getting started.

After a year of collaboration and innovation, IAALS Board of Advisors member Andrew Arruda has completed his term as our first entrepreneur-in-residence. We are deeply grateful to Arruda for his tireless work and invaluable expertise over this past year—and for everything he’s done to move our mission forward.

In December, IAALS and its partners continued the Redesigning Legal Speaker Series with a panel exploring the opportunities being created by regulatory innovation for legal education.

Throughout 2020, we saw just about every aspect of the legal profession move from in-person to virtual services. There have been a number of horror stories but also plenty of success stories, in which technology helped decrease court backlogs and increased access to the courts. So where does this leave us, and how do we move forward?

One of us is a law student. The other is a law professor. We’re both advocates for reforming legal education, particularly through expanded access to experiential learning opportunities. We're writing to highlight a model of experiential legal education—project-based learning—through a glimpse of Justice Lab, a course at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law.

Professor Anna Carpenter discusses her passion for access to justice, exciting developments in legal innovation, and what it means to receive the inaugural Alli Gerkman Legal Visionary Award.

In August, IAALS and its partners continued the Redesigning Legal Speaker Series with a panel exploring how lawyers and other legal professionals can help to solve access-to-justice problems using new advances in technology—while building sustainable practices at the same time.

Lawyer development is a single continuum that starts even before the first day of law school, and continues past the point when a lawyer has become an independent, confident, and proficient professional. Until we recognize this fact, we will continue to struggle to develop lawyers properly.

The goal of any licensure process should be to make sure the public is protected from incompetence without serving as an artificial barrier to people entering the legal profession. Indeed, this is precisely what the bar exam purports to do. But does the bar exam actually do those things?

In October 2020, IAALS published its groundbreaking report on the 12 building blocks of minimum competence to be a lawyer, our 5 insights for assessment, and our 10 recommendations for better legal licensing—with the goal of improving the bar exam and the overall licensing process. Here, we cover the fourth, fifth, and sixth building blocks of minimum competence.

As I’ve learned from many years practicing and advocating for innovative design changes in legal education, teaching online does not and should not involve doing what professors have always done—lecturing, leading discussions, and delivering exams—just through internet-enabled platforms. Instead, law professors should implement design principles to their courses for delivery in any modality: classroom, online, or blended.

I am thrilled to have officially joined IAALS as CEO on June 1. With 15 years of unparalleled success, IAALS is stronger than ever—and I look forward to contributing to the innovation and collaboration that are at the heart of its mission.