News & Updates

In time for the election season, IAALS today announced a new toolkit designed to educate voters about the performance record of judges up for retention. Judges Aren’t Sexy: Engaging and Educating Voters in a Crowded World is available immediately for states to use in their voter education efforts. In many states, voters have the right to decide which judges stay on the bench and which do not. However, getting readily understandable information about a judge’s record into the hands of voters has been difficult, until now.

It is hard to believe it has been seven months since our 4th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference last fall, where we presented initial results from our Foundations for Practice survey. Since that gathering, we have heard from countless legal educators who are embarking on the process to define and measure learning outcomes—and who are using Foundations for Practice to inform that process.

In a recent Colorado Public Radio/Colorado Matters story, the Center for Out-of-Court Divorce was featured as a promising alternative to the traditional lengthy, expensive, and often contentious in-court divorce.

It has been my honor to participate in IAALS’ Quality Judges Initiative as a member of the O’Connor Advisory Committee. Much of my time serving as President of the American Bar Association in 2008-2009 was devoted to efforts to assure adequate funding for the judicial branch of government and to improve judicial selection in order to assure fair and impartial courts; service on Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s committee was a logical following step after my term as ABA President ended. As a member of the O’Connor Advisory Committee, I have seen firsthand how QJI brings focus to the national debate on judicial selection issues and challenges. We have members who give perspective to the issues from various diverse backgrounds in order to come up with workable recommendations on judicial selection and judicial performance evaluation.

Back in 2011, Utah implemented significant statewide changes to its rules of civil procedure governing disclosure and discovery, incorporating proportionality and presumptive discovery limits based on tiers. Once again Utah is on the leading edge, implementing a Civil Case Management Pilot Program that promotes increased judicial case management oversight.

On December 1, 2015, the long awaited amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure went into effect, including changes focused on cooperation, active judicial case management, proportionality in discovery, and preservation/sanctions. Proving…

Last week, IAALS held our annual Rebuilding Justice Award Dinner in celebration of our 10th Anniversary and the remarkable progress we've made as a national force for legal reform. Our work is not accomplished alone, which is why we honored both past awardees and current partners for their dedication and their innovation.

Ten years ago, few would have predicted that IAALS would have such an impact on the legal system. The world wasn’t exactly clamoring for another legal think tank, and aside from a few visionaries in Denver, no one foresaw the need for an organization dedicated to the improvement of the legal system rather than partisan advocacy. Yet ten years later, IAALS has succeeded not only in prompting a conversation about how cases get litigated but in touching off a broader reexamination of a number of assumptions about attorney control over litigation, discovery, and the relationship of the legal system to the people it serves.

In February, IAALS Executive Director Rebecca Love Kourlis gave the keynote address for the Denton Darrington Annual Lecture on Law and Government in Boise. Speaking on “Building the Just, Speedy, and Inexpensive Civil Courts of Tomorrow: Why We Cannot Afford to Fail,” Kourlis emphasized the importance of a robust and responsive civil justice system, and the need for reform.

IAALS is celebrating our 10th Anniversary, which means our 2015 Annual Report marks a milestone in our history. This report takes a look back at our past decade of accomplishments as well as gazes forward into the future. Hard copies also include a special, pull-out timeline—a tour de force that showcases how far we’ve come in advancing excellence in the American legal system.

As IAALS celebrates its tenth year, the Denver Business Journal sat down with Executive Director Rebecca Love Kourlis to recap her motivation for leaving the Colorado Supreme Court and founding IAALS, and the impacts made over the last decade.

This week, the Denver Post published an article highlighting Denver’s new Center for Out-of-Court Divorce, which provides a child-focused, less-adversarial, and potentially less-costly approach for families when parents are separating.

In 2012, when I first started researching Splitopia, my book on today’s good divorce, I assumed there were dearth of good ideas around for helping families transition out of marriage smoothly. It would be my job, I decided, to develop new thinking for the age-old problem of marriage’s end. Upon further investigation, I discovered that many legal professionals, reformers, and mental health practitioners did have good ideas for helping adults and children navigate this difficult transition, but they weren’t communicating them adequately between disciplines and across states, let alone to divorcing families. I would start a national divorce communication program, perhaps affiliating with a think tank in Washington, D.C.!

On April 21, IAALS—the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver—will hold its annual Rebuilding Justice Award Dinner. The award recognizes individuals who exemplify the spirit of innovation and leadership that IAALS champions across all of our work toward building a legal system that is fair, accessible, reliable, efficient, and accountable.

Inspired in part by the work of the Conference of Chief Justice’s Civil Justice Improvements Committee, Chief Justice Scott Bales of the Arizona Supreme Court issued an Order at the end of last year establishing a new initiative for the Arizona Courts, creating a 24-member committee of judges, lawyers, and stakeholders to address ways in which civil litigation can be made more efficient and less expensive.

It’s that time of year again, when state legislatures are in session and lawmakers who are dissatisfied with the judiciary and some of its decisions are proposing changes in how judges are selected. This is nothing new: the O’Connor Judicial Selection Plan, which calls for commission-based appointment of judges, has been under attack in a number of states, and there seems to be a pattern to the attacks.

I spent half my legal career as a civil trial lawyer in New Hampshire trying all manner of cases in state and federal court and sometimes trying or preparing to try cases in other states and jurisdictions. I learned from some great lawyers and mentors over those years. They viewed a jury trial not as a failure of the system but as an integral part of American justice. They tried many of their cases with four or five depositions, twenty key exhibits, an expert or two, and a theory of the case. Justice was almost always served. The lawyers I admired understood the probing value of focused, incisive cross examination, the transformative power of a witness's solemn oath, the value of the courtroom's sterile unfamiliarity in a search for the truth, and the capacity and integrity of juries to render fair verdicts. They viewed trial lawyering as a craft with a noble purpose and never viewed discovery as an end it itself.

As is true in many jurisdictions, Arizona courts are finding that self-represented parties are heavily concentrated in family law matters, like divorce, child support, and custody. With little or no legal experience, litigants are navigating these complex processes by themselves—with many citing lawyer costs as prohibitive. .

Toward the end of last year when I first read IAALS’ report, Change the Culture, Change the System: Top 10 Cultural Shifts Needed to Create the Courts of Tomorrow, I had feelings of both trepidation and hope. It said a lot of things I have often thought about, but have not always spoken up about.

Last month, MSN released a ranking of the best and worst states (including D.C.) for getting a low-cost divorce, based on a survey conducted by GOBankingRates. The ranking takes into account factors like court filing fees, average hourly attorney…