News & Updates

In November, the Texas Supreme Court issued long-awaited rules for expedited actions, proposing a mandatory expedited process for cases of $100,000 or less. The Texas Supreme Court has since issued revised final rules, which became effective March 1, 2013. Despite considerable public commentary on the mandatory nature of the rules, the Expedited Actions process under Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 169 remains mandatory for cases of $100,000 or less.

A joint legislative committee considered changing the process for selecting the state’s appellate judges. The primary proposal is to put party labels for judicial candidates back on the ballot, in order to enhance voter information.

The issue of how to provide litigants with equal access to legal services, regardless of the litigant’s financial status, has plagued the legal community for some time now. One solution that is gaining popularity is unbundled legal services, where lawyers work on and charge clients for only those tasks that they agree to in advance.

You may have noticed a new voice in our Honoring Families blog posts. Natalie Knowlton has been with IAALS since 2006 and joined the staff full time in 2008, working first as a Research Analyst across initiatives and then as Manager of the Quality Judges Initiative. Now, she will make significant contributions to our Honoring Families Initiative as its Director.

As part of his plan to “overhaul” the federal government, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry proposed eighteen-year, staggered terms for supreme court justices and similarly limited terms for lower federal court judges.

Courts are—to a great extent—in the business of customer service. A new IAALS report, Eighteen Ways Courts Should Use Technology to Better Serve Their Customers, provides a path forward to help courts use existing technologies to improve the user experience, particularly for those people who choose to represent themselves.

Recently, speculation has surfaced about whether judicial selection and tenure will be addressed at a special legislative session in Oklahoma, called by Governor Fallin. Although a Republican legislator wrote a letter warning judges around the state of rumors that there would be efforts to impose term limits and to eliminate the judicial nominating commission, a spokesman for the governor offered assurances that the only topic for the special session is lawsuit reform.

The interest in reforming the graduate level education experience is not unique to law. The Economist reports that Harvard Business School is experimenting with a new curriculum, "FIELD" (Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development), that embraces "learning by doing."

After 13 years of growing IAALS from a fledgling idea to a nationally recognized force for change and evolution on the legal landscape, Rebecca Love Kourlis will retire from her role as Executive Director in September. The Chancellor of the University of Denver, Rebecca Chopp, and the Executive Committee of IAALS have opted to fill Kourlis’ formidable shoes with another national leader, Scott Bales, who recently announced he will step down as Chief Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court.

The State Bar of Michigan, which represents more than 43,000 attorneys and judges, has asked the secretary of state to require disclosure of funders of "issue ads" in state elections. Specifically, the bar is seeking an interpretive ruling that such ads should be treated as advocacy rather than electioneering and thus as official campaign spending. Such a ruling would require the disclosure of donors who are currently anonymous.

2011 was a banner year. Working with partners and stakeholders around the country last year, we made significant advances on several key projects. We launched a new initiative, Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers, in a year when law schools are under more…

As thousands prepare to sit for the bar exam, IAALS is spearheading an empirical effort to define the minimum competence they need to practice law and to ensure the fairness, efficacy, and validity of the bar exam itself.

IAALS is thrilled by the news that Judge Russell Carparelli of the Colorado Court of Appeals will take the helm at the American Judicature Society (AJS) as of January 1, 2014. IAALS has partnered with AJS on a handful of projects and we look forward to strengthening our collaborative relationship under his leadership. And Judge Carparelli is also a friend of IAALS in both the professional and personal sense, engaged actively in our Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers and Quality Judges Initiatives.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama called for judicial nominees to get an up-or-down vote after 90 days, regardless of whether they could overcome a filibuster.

Eldercaring Coordination is an innovative dispute resolution process for high-conflict cases, providing an alternative to the traditional adversarial court process. By directly focusing on elders and their legally authorized decisionmakers, Eldercaring Coordination helps families work together to regain harmony and make decisions for the elder that all family members can agree on. 

In August 2014, all of Tennessee's appellate judges will appear on the ballot, and voters will decide whether they should be retained in office. By that time, the Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission will have provided information to the public about these judges' performance on the bench. Last month, the commission announced that it may take the unprecedented step of recommending against the retention of three intermediate appellate court judges.

This article provides an overview of the Seventh Circuit Electronic Discovery Pilot Program, which IAALS tracks as part of its Rule One Initiative, and discusses the program's potential to have an impact beyond the Seventh Circuit.

We join countless others in wishing retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor all the best today on her 90th birthday. Her life's journey has been remarkable, from her historic appointment to the Supreme Court to her inspiring civics and judicial selection achievements. IAALS and the public have benefited greatly from her efforts.

In a recent article, Law Week Colorado covered IAALS' newest publication, Working Smarter, Not Harder: How Excellent Judges Manage Cases. The article features interviews with IAALS Executive Director and former Colorado Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Love Kourlis and 4th Judicial District Judge David Prince, one of the judges who was featured in Working Smarter.

A recent survey shows that the state’s courts have become more diverse over the last five years, with women comprising one third of the bench and racial minorities making small gains as well. On the supreme court, white males are in the minority, with women in four of the seven seats and four justices of Asian descent.