News & Updates

Last September, we held our 5th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference, where we welcomed approximately 100 legal educators and legal employers from around the country (and the world!) to discuss the measurement of meaningful learning outcomes and development of hiring criteria, focusing on the results of our Foundations for Practice project. It has become a tradition to kick off the first day of the conference with a series of Ignite presentations (snappy, 6 minute, auto-advancing) from ETL Consortium School faculty who want to share their projects, successes, and ideas. Presenters spoke on topics ranging from faculty resources to career development to simulations. You can find recordings of all of the 2016 Ignites below.

The National Center for State Courts and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government recently published a paper, "Keeping Courts Funded: Recommendations on How Courts Can Avoid the Budget Axe", which offers a perspective on how state courts can more effectively argue for sufficient funding by approaching the budgetary process proactively, effectively, and humbly.

This opinion piece by ALM's editor-in-chief argues that change in legal education won't be driven by universities, professors, students or employers, but rather by the client community and the organized bar (specifically, the American Bar Association…

This month the Northern District of Illinois launched a three-year pilot project, known as the Mandatory Initial Discovery Pilot Project (MIDP). The pilot project requires robust mandatory initial discovery with the goal of reducing cost and delay in civil litigation. Through a General Order, the court has ordered that the MIDP program be implemented in all civil cases filed on or after June 1, 2017, except as to those categories of cases that are exempted under the MIDP Standing Order.

Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Advisory Committee member Paul Lippe is speaking to the “Deans Workshop for ABA Approved Schools” on February 15. In a post at The New Normal, he asked “How would you shape the law school experience for the next generation?” He has 44 responses and counting.

In the wake of the defeat of three justices in the November 2010 retention elections, members of the Iowa Supreme Court have been more active in outreach efforts to educate the public about the role of the courts. One justice will stand for retention in 2012, and a challenge is anticipated.

At next month's Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Conference, we will spend Saturday morning in a Design Thinking workshop. It will be a hands-on way to learn what a design approach is, for you to use as an experiential teaching method or as a problem-solving process. When you hear the word “design,” you might assume this method is all about visuals, making things look nice, and choosing the best PowerPoint themes. Good visual design is important. But “Design Thinking” focuses not so much on visuals, as on solving problems in more human-centered and experimental ways. It's about understanding a challenge area from different stakeholders' perspectives, and then quickly building and testing new solutions to see which have the greatest promise.

President Obama appears to be making diversity a priority in his judicial appointments. Of the 35 federal judicial nominees awaiting a Senate confirmation vote, 17 are women, 15 are ethnic minorities, and five are openly gay. Of the judges who were confirmed during Obama’s first term, 37 percent were non-white and 42 percent were women. These figures are notably higher than those of his predecessors.

A local chapter of the League of Women Voters hosted a forum on diversity in state courts as part of a national campaign to promote impartial courts and judicial diversity. The League made several recommendations for enhancing diversity among the state’s judges, most of whom are elected by the legislature after being vetted by a commission composed of legislators and members of the public.

The Wisconsin Lawyer recently reviewed IAALS' Foundations for Practice study and discussed some of its ties to Wisconsin's legal community. Of the more than 24,000 lawyers nationwide who participated, 500 were from Wisconsin. In the first part of the survey, at least three-fourths of those respondents said that characteristics were vital for new lawyers to have right out of school, while professional competencies and legal skills were less immediately valuable. Alli Gerkman, the director at IAALS who oversees the Foundations project, emphasized that the survey suggests that legal skills were still important, but new lawyers do not need to have them all mastered right out of law school.

Socially conservative legislators in Alaska have proposed a bill that would remove the judicial council’s authority to make recommendations regarding judges standing for retention. In Tennessee, legislators have proposed a bill that would allow them to reconstitute the nine-member performance evaluation commission with no judge members. It would also authorize the commission to rewrite existing evaluative criteria and to prevent judges who receive a recommendation “for replacement” from standing for retention.

House Speaker Dean Cannon announced that he would not seek major changes to the judiciary in the 2012 legislative session. In the 2011 session, Cannon unsuccessfully proposed a constitutional amendment that would have split and expanded the supreme court. Instead, voters in 2012 will only weigh in on whether to require senate confirmation of supreme court appointments.

Much has been done over the past five years to address the cost and delay in the civil justice process, and much of that work has focused on discovery. Recognizing that there are equal challenges and opportunities for improvement in the area of motions practice, IAALS has focused on understanding the current motions landscape and issuing recommendations for improvement. In this effort, IAALS has released a new report intended to spark a national conversation about the current challenges of summary judgment.

In remarks at last week’s annual conference of the state bar association, Justice Barry Albin encouraged members of the legal profession and the public to defend New Jersey’s courts against attacks by the other two branches based on dissatisfaction with court decisions. He went on to suggest that the governor and the legislature have injected politics into the judicial appointment process.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Congress might be readying for congressional hearings law schools, their job placement numbers, and the debt their graduates are carrying with them.

Through its Better Access through Unbundling Conference, IAALS has set the national agenda for expanding legal access through limited scope services—and the table is set for the use and growth of unbundling. Jurisdictions have the benefit of model rules, bar endorsement, and replicable models to encourage lawyers to unbundle and make that availability known to consumers.

Last week, controversy arose in Kansas over Governor Brownback's announcement that he would not release the names of applicants for a court of appeals vacancy. The governor initially rejected a petition requesting that applicants' names be released, but he may be reconsidering that decision. Meanwhile, screening committees in Wisconsin and Florida, established to assist them in recommending potential federal judges to the White House, have differing plans on the confidentiality of applicant names.

The December 2011 edition of Selection Snapshots is now available.

In the past several years, design thinking has gained traction in the legal field as a method for involving litigants and other stakeholders in developing improvements to the legal system. IAALS has taken design thinking one step further in applying a structured qualitative research approach to the process.

In the latest edition of Unified Family Court Connection, IAALS Honoring Families Initiative Advisory Committee members William J. Howe, III and Justice Paul J. DeMuniz highlight Oregon's efforts to better serve children and families dealing with divorce and conflict. Included in its efforts is an Informal Domestic Relations Trial that IAALS helped the Oregon State Family Law Advisory Committee develop. The authors also discuss the model for Resource Centers for Separating and Divorcing Families, which was developed by the Honoring Families Initiative.