Publications

This report provides a summary of the recommendations and solutions coming out of the IAALS/ABA Better Access through Unbundling conference, which are designed to add to the strengthening foundation for widespread implementation of unbundled legal services.

In this report, we make recommendations for judicial discipline systems that are designed to achieve a balance between transparency and accountability, confidentiality and trustworthiness—all with the goal of enhancing public trust and confidence in the judges of this nation.

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.

Despite the recent focus on case management, and the literature and experience on the ground that all pointed to the importance of case management decades ago, it is still not the norm. This report recognizes that case management is essential for judges, courts, attorneys, and—most importantly—the litigants.

This document provides a description of common metrics and methods for assessing the effectiveness of existing and newly implemented civil justice rules and business practices.

This questionnaire provides a structured self-assessment tool to help court leaders highlight areas within their civil justice system in need of reform as well as potential implementation barriers.

Judicial recusal in appropriate circumstances is essential to ensuring a judiciary that is qualified and impartial and that inspires public trust. But states vary substantially in the key features of their judicial recusal procedures. This report makes eight recommendations for crafting recusal procedures that are efficient, transparent, and fair to both judge and litigant.

Our studies show that the court system does an insufficient job helping people navigate their way through the system to resolution. People feel frustrated, lost, disempowered, and disillusioned by our legal system, especially self-represented litigants. In an effort to address this issue, IAALS' Court Compass project intends to create a shared base of information that will allow us to move toward solutions.

This roadmap provides guidance and support for implementing the Conference of Chief Justices recommendations for improving the American civil justice system in a way that is thoughtful, responsive to the needs of court users, well-designed, and well-executed—so that the reforms have the greatest possibility of success.

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 publication offers a menu of recommended practices and tools for designing and implementing a judicial performance evaluation program that fosters legitimacy in the eyes of the public and the judges.

In February 2016, IAALS hosted its Fourth Civil Justice Reform Summit with the goal of charting the next steps for creating the just, speedy, and inexpensive courts of tomorrow. This report summarizes the discussion at the Summit and captures current efforts toward reform, challenges of implementation, and specific proposals that were shared.

The Conference of Chief Justices’ Civil Justice Improvements Committee was formed in 2013 to examine the civil justice system and develop a comprehensive set of recommendations for civil justice reform. This report is a call to action to the state courts to improve our civil justice system—and a strategic response in the form of thirteen recommendations for restoring function and faith in a system that is too important to lose.

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.

In June 2016, IAALS convened a group of people from around the country to discuss the development of an online tool designed to help people with potential legal problems in the family court arena and to help self-represented litigants with these kinds of cases in court. This paper is the outgrowth of that convening and details next steps in a plan designed to coalesce energy and funding toward achievement of such an online tool.

This report chronicles and analyzes the two-year pilot project of IAALS' out-of-court model for separation and divorce at the Resource Center for Separating and Divorcing Families. The purpose of this report is to provide insight into one implementation of the IAALS model and the primarily positive results will be useful for policy makers and decision makers nationwide.

In November 2015, the IAALS hosted a two-day summit that brought together diverse leaders of the family law bar to identify obstacles to serving children and families in separation and divorce matters, and explore opportunities for meaningful change. Interactive, engaging conversation highlighted a number of themes and recommendations.

The findings in this research report focus on major themes revealed through the Cases Without Counsel study. In their own words, self-represented litigants and court professionals discuss the challenges involved in self-representation from their perspectives.