Stemming from our 2022 Community & Cooperation convening, this report distills key themes and recommendations for next steps aimed at bolstering existing regulatory innovation efforts and kickstarting new ones, and creating opportunities to engage new people and perspectives in the movement.
This report summarizes best practices for allied legal professional (ALP) programs, including 18 high-level recommendations, that can serve as a guide for states considering, implementing, or refining ALP programs.
In this report, IAALS explores a longer-term view of civil filings in our state courts and provides additional insights into the specific role that courts have played in resolving cases, how that role might be changing, and the factors that are expected to continue to influence the filing of cases in our state court system going forward.
In this report from the Civil Justice Initiative, the Texas Office of Court Administration, the National Center for State Courts, and IAALS found that rules adopted by the Supreme Court of Texas in 2012 have expedited the resolution of cases—both before and after the pandemic.
This report examines why many states have begun to create a new tier of legal service providers who are not lawyers, and describes the similarities and differences between each program. The report is designed to be used as a resource for states interested in creating their own program to understand not only what other states’ programs consist of, but also the reasoning behind many of their decisions.
This report details the key discussion points from the Unbundled Legal Services in the New Normal conference, focusing on how the pandemic helped normalize digitization and the use of technology for legal service providers generally—and how to further advance unbundled legal services nationwide.
This white paper is a primer on the general purposes and history of judicial performance evaluation (JPE); the various evaluation criteria, tools, and procedures used in JPE programs; the varying perspectives on JPE; and issues in the realm of JPE warranting focused consideration going forward.
In 2020, the Denver Law Firm Coalition for Racial Equity and IAALS brought together local leaders to identify and explore sustainable and long-term DEI solutions. This report details best practices and recommendations to recruit, retain, and advance racially diverse attorneys.
This report provides nationwide data on the justice needs that people in the United States experience every day and a deeper understanding of how people in the United States resolve those justice needs, as well as what is working and what isn’t, to inform and help target reform efforts.
This guide is for employers who want to improve their hiring practices—to improve quality, retention, and diversity—based on what IAALS has learned from the Foundations for Practice project. The guide is a set of principles and recommendations geared toward hiring candidates suited to excel at an organization— based on that organization’s practice, vision, goals, and needs—that can be adapted to the specific objectives and goals of different employers.
This instructional design guide is for educators who are interested in using what IAALS has learned from the Foundations for Practice project as a basis for learning outcomes and standards-based assessments. The guide uses a step-by-step approach to implement a Foundations-based instructional model in the university law classroom.
These Initial Discovery Protocols provide a new pretrial procedure that aims to reduce conflict and cost and to help businesses and insurers reach quick resolution during the COVID-19 pandemic, whether it be in settlement, motions practice, or trial. They are designed to be implemented by trial judges, lawyers, and litigants in state and federal courts.
Through detailed case studies, this report showcases the innovation occurring in courts, self-help centers, legal aid centers, and law/public libraries in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lessons learned from these organizations can be helpful to others that are still updating their services or exploring adding virtual services.
The legal profession has never had a clear, explicit understanding of the minimum competence needed to practice law and how it should be tested on the bar exam (or through other licensing approaches). In this report, we have defined minimum competence and have new recommendations for how the legal licensing process—including the bar exam—must change to better serve the public.
IAALS undertook this study to explore the critical issue of public trust and confidence in the civil legal system through a qualitative lens. The study’s long-form, one-on-one interviews explored several facets: the value of courts, trust in judges, ideal judicial behavior, available information on the legal system, and popular media depictions of the system, among others.
