Publications

With over a decade of experience and seven states having implemented allied legal professional programs, the time is ripe for a concerted effort on reciprocity. This report present insights and outcomes from IAALS' convening on ALP reciprocity, including a framework for states on what to include in a reciprocity rule.

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 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.

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.

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.

To help trial judges better manage cases involving self-represented litigants, this guide summarizes effective practices for resolving cases with one or more self-represented litigants in the courtroom and provides specific examples of their application in the family law context.

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.