News & Updates

Divorce filings in China have surged recently due to married couples’ desire to avoid the country's new 20 percent capital gains tax. Because the tax only applies to second home sales, many couples reasoned that a divorce would enable them to claim that each had only one home and evade paying the tax.

Governor Nixon selected George Draper III from three nominees submitted to him by the appellate judicial commission to fill a vacancy on the supreme court. Draper will be the second African-American to serve on the court. He will stand for retention in 2014.

The IAALS Court Compass project is exploring streamlined and simplified solutions that help people through the divorce and separation process. While the project aims to make the process better for all litigants, there is a particular focus on people who go to court without an attorney. The Court Compass project is employing a number of human-centered design tools, including in-person design sprints and other focus groups to test new processes and solutions in real time and refine them based on user feedback. IAALS and the Iowa Judicial Branch are partnering to bring a design sprint workshop to Des Moines later this month.

The Tennessee legislature ended its 2013 session without renewing the state’s judicial nominating commission, which screens applicants for appellate court vacancies and recommends the best qualified candidates to the governor for appointment. The commission expires on June 30, and as of July 1, there will be no process in place for filling vacancies on the supreme court, court of appeals, and court of criminal appeals.

As criminal cases crowd already crowded dockets, civil litigants see resolutions to their disputes delayed indefinitely. Click here to read the article.

Our courts are suffering from a severe lack of public confidence. In a recent piece for the ABA Journal, ABA President-elect Judy Perry Martinez suggests that the causes are twofold, and to begin rebuilding public trust and confidence in our courts, she has a few suggestions.

This fall, the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, an Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers consortium school, plans to implement its new Experiential Advantage Curriculum, a program that will focus on placing students in real or simulated practice settings. Using clinics, externships, semester-in-practice opportunities, and class simulations, law students in the program will have a full year of practical experience upon graduation.

David Segal of the New York Times is again writing about law schools, this time addressing their failure to produce practice-ready graduates.

Many courts across the country struggle with overburdened staff and inefficient processes. However,  those within the judiciary are now turning to technology to make their courts more efficient and narrow the equal justice gap. 

A recent article in the Washington Post suggests that our current concept of marriage needs to adapt to the high divorce rate in the United States. As a solution, the author borrows a concept from property law and suggests that couples enter into “wedleases”—agreements in which couples commit to one another for a set period of years. The article argues that “wedleases” provide a practical option for couples to part ways at the end of a bad relationship without going through a messy divorce process.

A trial court judge was removed from hearing all asbestos cases after accepting $30,000 in campaign contributions from attorneys whose firms had cases on the judge’s asbestos docket.

As state courts around the country have been responding to the Conference of Chief Justices' 2016 Call to Action for civil justice reform, IAALS, NCSC, and NCJFCJ also have been focused on developing companion recommendations for evaluating and improving the way courts handle domestic relations cases, which have just been released.

Judge Paul W. Grimm is well known for his contributions in the area of improving the pretrial discovery process, particularly with regard to the discovery of electronically stored information. Judge Grimm’s Discovery Order provides an excellent model for facilitating judicial management, and we recommend it to state and federal court judges alike as a model and inspiration to manage the pretrial discovery process so as to reduce the cost and burden of discovery.

Republicans legislators have introduced several bills this session aimed at the courts, including changing the way judges are disciplined and amending the constitution to address how judges are selected. A proposal that would have stripped the courts of judicial review over state laws was withdrawn by its sponsor after it met with heavy criticism from both parties.

Alternative dispute resolution is becoming increasingly more prevalent in New York state civil courts, and New York recently announced a renewed commitment to ADR. Legal professionals believe ADR, and in particular mediation, could have a dramatic improvement in some areas of family law, including expediting divorce proceedings and—perhaps most significantly—decreasing the emotional havoc that divorce can wreak on both parties and their children.

A couple years ago, Milbank Tweed announced Milbank@Harvard, billed as a "groundbreaking multi-year training program for Milbank associates" to give them broader context for the commercial matters they handle for clients everyday. This month, David Wolfson, a Milbank partner, talked more about the program with Lee Pacchia of Bloomberg.

Two Republican legislators proposed a bill that would require attorneys to disclose to the judge and all parties to a lawsuit any campaign contributions of more than $500 made to that judge by the attorney or the attorney’s firm within the past five years. The bill would also require the judge’s recusal upon a motion filed by a non-contributing party.

Next week, the American Bar Association kicks off its 2020 Midyear Meeting, and the ABA Center for Innovation has submitted Resolution 115 for passage by the ABA House of Delegates. Resolution 115 would encourage jurisdictions to consider innovative approaches to increase low- and middle-income Americans’ access to justice and to collect and assess data before and after the adoption of any regulatory innovations.

Documentary film Divorce Corp opens in cities across the country today, drawing critical attention to family courts and those involved in the system. The Honoring Families Initiative recognizes that cost, complexity, and access are issues in the family court system, and IAALS will be participating on a panel discussion about possible solutions following a screening of the movie in Denver on January 12, which is open to the public.

Governor Branstad recently made thirty appointments to the state’s district judicial nominating commissions. Many of them oppose the merit selection process, and at least one of them was active in the campaign to defeat the three justices up for retention in 2010.