Publications

Utah's legal regulatory sandbox allows nontraditional legal service providers and business structures to enter the legal marketplace in an effort to close the justice gap. IAALS is conducting a robust evaluation throughout the pilot phase of the sandbox, and this report covers our findings related to the outcomes and intended impacts of the Sandbox, including the types of entities operating, the services provided, and the quality of those services.

Utah's legal regulatory sandbox allows nontraditional legal service providers and business structures to enter the legal marketplace in an effort to close the justice gap. IAALS is conducting a robust evaluation throughout the pilot phase of the sandbox, and this report covers our evaluation questions, the methodological approaches we employed, and in-depth discussion of the findings from this component of the sandbox evaluation.

Utah's legal regulatory sandbox allows nontraditional legal service providers and business structures to enter the legal marketplace in an effort to close the justice gap. IAALS is conducting a robust evaluation throughout the pilot phase of the sandbox, and this report presents important background and contextual information along with an overview of the purpose and evaluative approaches used.

This report details survey findings from judges across eight states, revealing their perspectives on judicial performance evaluation (JPE) processes in their states today, what is working well, and challenges with their 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 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.

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.

This report details findings from our interactive Court Compass design sprint workshops, where we led self-represented litigants and court stakeholders in identifying problems people face in navigating the legal process, brainstorming potential solutions to those problems, and creating prototypes for those solutions.

Understanding what clients want and expect from their lawyers is imperative for the provision of high-quality legal services, as well as for lawyers’ success in the legal profession. This report represents a first step for the profession in developing a comprehensive, evidence-based understanding of what clients value.

IAALS developed an interdisciplinary out-of-court model to provide a comprehensive set of legal and therapeutic services to separating and divorcing families. The model provided families the opportunity to complete the divorce process without ever having to go to court. This report presents insights into the model as well as data from a robust evaluation on how the Center for Out-of-Court Divorce operated.

This guide provides courts and similar organizations with the tools to create their own design sprint workshops wherein they can solicit the knowledge and experience from both self-represented litigants and other court stakeholders to simplify and improve court processes.

IAALS has focused on understanding the current motions landscape and issuing recommendations for improvement. This report is intended to spark a national conversation about the current challenges of summary judgment, a process by which the court can rule on a portion or all of the issues in a case without proceeding to trial.

This report to the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) describes a large but relatively unknown group of executive branch adjudicators who are not “Administrative Law Judges” (ALJs) governed by the Administrative Procedure Act. ACUS commissioned this report to obtain data and provide recommendations concerning non-ALJs’ appointment, independence, and oversight.

This report analyzes data from the Foundations for Practice survey regarding hiring practices and answers this question: How can employers hire new lawyers who have the foundations they desire?

This is the lead report in a series of reports that explore the results of the Foundations for Practice survey, which was designed to clarify the legal skills, professional competencies, and characteristics that make lawyers successful. New lawyers need some legal skills and require intelligence, but they are successful when they come to the job with a much broader blend of legal skills, professional competencies, and characteristics.

This report describes the Foundations for Practice survey and methodology used for the foundations and describes the demographics and practice-specific characteristics of the respondents.