News & Updates

IAALS is thrilled to announce that Chief Judge Susan Blanco, Mark Chandler, Helen M. Hierschbiel, and Victor Quintanilla have joined our Board of Advisors. We are eager to work together to ensure justice for all is a reality for all.

In 2013, the Colorado Judicial Branch created the Self-Represented Litigant Coordinator (Sherlock) program. The Sherlocks, operating in courthouses in each of Colorado’s judicial districts, assist litigants with information on court procedures, forms…

LawMeets, a website that provides law students with free transactional simulations, is now offering free transactional law courses which can be used by individual students or incorporated into law school classes. These online courses will combine lectures and simulations to teach law students the nuts-and-bolts of business transactions.

I recently attended IAALS’ Fourth Civil Justice Reform Summit and served as a faculty member on several panels. It never fails that I come away from these gatherings with more ideas. I began to take notes on this question—what can we do to effect the changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure?

All eight candidates for the state’s appellate courts qualified for public financing, with supreme court candidates receiving $240,100 each and court of appeals candidates receiving $164,400. At least two outside groups are raising and spending funds in support of the Republican supreme court candidate.

This November, five of the seven justices on the Kansas Supreme Court are standing for retention, and many court watchers in Kansas and around the country are anticipating a no-holds-barred election battle. The supreme court on one side and the governor and legislature on the other have been at odds for the last several years over court decisions involving school funding and capital punishment.

Conservative groups have mounted a loosely organized effort to oppose the retention of Justice John Pelander because of his vote in a 3-2 ruling that allows Proposition 121 to appear on the November ballot.

Figuring out how to educate law students to meet the needs of modern law practice is vitally important given shrinking job markets and changing demands on lawyers. IAALS has accepted that challenge with its Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers initiative, which focuses on preparing new lawyers for successful participation in the legal profession. Law schools have traditionally focused on applicants’ LSAT scores and grade point averages to determine admissions to law schools. This produces a student body designed to perform well on standardized tests and in college-type settings. 

In Bexar County, the recent election has produced another wave of straight-ticket voting on judges. Texas is one of only three states in which voters can cast a straight-party ballot for all candidates, including judicial candidates. This year, Democrats won all but one of the races, but in 2010, a similar partisan sweep resulted in Republicans winning every contested judicial race in Bexar County.

The National Self-Represented Litigants Project (NSRLP) has launched a new resource in Canada. The National Database of Professionals Assisting SRLs contains contact information for attorneys offering unbundled legal services, and paralegals and other professionals willing to offer affordable services.

This month, IAALS launched the first edition of IAALS Report, our new monthly newsletter. It’s a great way to keep up with news and progress in all four of our initiatives: Quality Judges, Rule One, Honoring Families, and Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers. We believe IAALS Report will be a convenient way to keep you even more informed about issues affecting the civil justice system as we move into 2013.

The last ten years has seen an intense and almost singular focus on discovery. E-discovery has been a big reason for this, given its impact on the entire discovery process from identification to production. Nevertheless, there is another important aspect to the pretrial system that also results in great cost and delay—motions.

In his first news conference, new Republican Governor Pat McCrory rescinded the executive order enacted by his predecessor, Democratic Governor Bev Perdue, creating a judicial nominating commission for filling midterm vacancies on the state’s courts.

The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver today launches a unique, national initiative to change the way law schools educate students. “Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers” provides a platform to encourage law schools in the U.S. to showcase innovative teaching to produce more practice-ready lawyers who can better meet the needs of an evolving profession.

A couple years ago, IAALS co-sponsored a conference called Client-Centric Legal Services. While there were many interesting takeaways, there was one that I still think about all the time. A speaker suggested that, in legal education, we spend so much time thinking about how to teach students to think like lawyers that we often forget we also need them to think like clients. The challenges facing the legal profession right now are many—and many of them will be more successfully addressed if we listen to and better understand the needs of legal consumers. That mindset begins in law school, which is why clients are at the center of our 6th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference.

A senate panel approved a bill that would expand the state’s seven-member judicial nominating commission, adding two commissioners who would be appointed by the leaders of each chamber. Currently, the judicial conference appoints two trial court judges, the state bar president appoints three lawyers, and the governor appoints two non-lawyers to serve on the commission.

With the launch of Rebuilding Justice, which hit the shelves this week, Rebecca Love Kourlis wrote a guest post for Justice at Stake's Gavel Grab.

Arizona’s Supreme Court has approved numerous civil justice reforms “aimed at reducing the time and expense it takes to resolve civil cases in Arizona’s superior courts.” The reforms are based on the recommendations of Arizona’s Civil Justice Reform Committee, which was established by the Arizona Supreme Court in December 2015 to “develop recommendations, including rule amendments or pilot projects, to reduce the cost and time required to resolve civil cases in Arizona’s superior courts.”

Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Advisory Committee member Paul Lippe recently spoke to the "Deans Workshop for ABA Approved Schools," and, while that meeting was off the record, he proposes new ideas and frameworks for changing the current law school model in a post at The New Normal.

In October 2011, IAALS recognized three federal judges as the 2011 recipients of the Fifth Annual Transparent Courthouse® Award: the Honorable Mark R. Kravitz, the Honorable Lee H. Rosenthal, and the Honorable John G. Koeltl.