News & Updates

Governor Rick Perry appointed his chief of staff to fill a supreme court vacancy created by Justice Dale Wainwright’s September resignation. Governor Perry has a history of appointing close advisors to top state positions including seats on the high court.

Later this week at the ABA Midyear Meeting, a panel discussion will focus on the current challenges facing our civil justice system, recommendations for achieving civil justice for all, and how to make these recommendations a reality in our state…

Approximately one year ago, on November 1, 2011, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York implemented a Pilot Project Regarding Case Management Techniques for Complex Civil Cases. The Board of Judges has now extended the pilot project for an additional eighteen months, to expire September 30, 2014.

IAALS board member Russell Wheeler discusses recent proposals to apply the United States Judicial Conference's Code of Conduct for United States Judges to members of the Supreme Court and establish a new appellate route to review recusals.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court recently approved a rule allowing a lawyer-mediator to draft and file settlement documents in family law cases, which can provide a more cost-effective path to divorce for families. In this situation, the lawyer’s role is limited and the he or she would not represent either party to the mediation; therefore, the lawyer may not give legal advice or advocate on behalf of either party. Parties are also encouraged to seek independent legal advice prior to signing the documents prepared by the lawyer-mediator.

The Western District of Washington has amended its Local Civil Rules, which include their express purpose of promoting “the just, efficient, speedy, and economical determination of every action and proceeding.” Local Rule 26(f) states that the proportionality standard set forth in Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(2)(C) “must be applied in every case when parties formulate a discovery plan and promulgate discovery requests.”

Jordan Furlong, who wrote last week about what he called " the decline and fall of law school," came back to the topic of legal education. This time he focused on new lawyer training and looked at, among other ideas, the "teaching law firm." Click…

This month, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and the American Bar Association Judicial Division released Building a Diverse Bench: Selecting Federal Magistrate and Bankruptcy Judges, a resource that offers practical steps the federal judiciary can take to promote a more diverse bench. A diverse bench is essential to an effective judiciary. A bench that reflects the diversity of the public it serves enhances public confidence in the role of the courts in our democracy, and provides role models for groups underrepresented in the legal profession. And diversity is more than symbolic—having broader perspectives on the bench produces a richer jurisprudence, incorporating a wider and more representative range of experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives.

The oldest advice in the world is that the trick is not in knowing the answers—rather it is in knowing the right questions to ask. Such advice has broad application, and in the current debate about legal education, it is quite possible that the wrong questions are currently on the table. The question should not simply be: why does legal education cost so much? Rather, the question should focus on reassessing and re-measuring the value of legal education.

There may be as many as 175 judicial elections—both contested and retention—on the 2012 general election ballot. Two of these races are at the supreme court level, with one justice expected to stand for retention and one justice who was appointed to the bench competing against several challengers to keep her seat.

Nicole Bradick is a lawyer, Chief Strategy Officer at CuroLegal, and an advocate for expanding access to justice. As she writes in a recent post at Lawyerist, she was a federal court litigator for eight years and had some exposure to state court pro bono cases, but her observational visit to an eviction court this summer was the first time she ever observed such a court from the self-represented litigant’s perspective. Her verdict? “Eviction court really, really sucks.” Bradick writes that she was dismayed by the treatment of the litigants and an environment that fosters imbalance, and that she was “[e]mbarrassed because in all my time practicing law, I never bothered to sit in court and feel what it’s like in the shoes of a self-represented litigant.” She is, of course, not the only one.

The Iowa Supreme Court is moving forward with implementation of a Business Specialty Court Pilot Project and will begin receiving cases on May 1, 2013. The Business Specialty Court Pilot Project grows out of the recommendations of Iowa’s Supreme Court Task Force for Civil Justice Reform. Among the recommendations was the establishment of a business court pilot project, one judge/one case and date certain for trial, adoption of the Federal Rules’ initial disclosure regime, and a two-tiered differentiated case management pilot project.

Economist and Brookings Senior Fellow Clifford Winston has co-authored a new book that has created conversation around its premise, which is evident in its title: First Thing We Do, Let's Deregulate All the Lawyers. In this New York Times op-ed about the legal profession, he asks: "What if the barriers to entry were simply done away with?"

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.

As a former Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court and a current member of the IAALS Board of Advisors, I commend Governor Maggie Hassan for her wisdom in establishing the Judicial Selection Commission to advise her in filling vacancies on our state’s courts. Such a commission ensures that political considerations take a back seat to qualifications, experience, and judicial potential in selecting judges.

The judicial nominating commission held public interviews of the eighteen applicants for a court of appeals vacancy.

In the most recent issue of the Bar Examiner, Alli Gerkman and I discuss the perceived skills gap that affects employment for newly graduated law students, an issue that has even greater implications for the profession as a whole when new lawyers enter the workforce unprepared or underprepared.

In 2012, the divorce rate in China exceeded the marriage rate. According to China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, 2.87 million people applied for divorce in 2012, a seven percent increase from the year prior. Thirteen million couples married in China in 2012, representing an increase of 1.6 percent from 2011.

The November 2011 edition of the Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers newsletter is now available. Sign up for this and other IAALS newsletters here.

For the fifth year in a row, the National Center for State Courts has conducted a comprehensive public opinion survey to gauge the level of public trust and confidence in the state courts. The State of the State Courts survey provides an important window into public views of our court system, including comparisons across past surveys and insights into key issues for the future of our state courts including self-representation and online dispute resolution.