Iaals In The News

For years, law school graduates have struggled to find full-time employment, facing a highly saturated, fiercely competitive job market. There continues to be a gap between what law schools teach and what legal employers expect from new graduates—and not enough traditional law firm positions to hire them all. 

In direct response to an ABA study on attorney well-being and IAALS’ Foundations for Practice project and findings, University of Denver Sturm College of Law Professor Debra Austin brought to life a class called “Professionalism and Well-Being Skills for the Effective Lawyer,” which began this fall.

The Colorado Supreme Court’s Attorney Regulation Counsel recently released statistics on the state’s legal employment, which revealed an interesting trend. According to the Denver Business Journal, the study found that fewer than half of the 1,473 active female attorneys younger than 30 years old are working in law firms of any size, and only 20 percent of female attorneys in that age range went to work for big law firms. At the same time, law school classes around the country are fairly equally divided between male and female students, on average.

In a recent article for Metropolitan Corporate Counsel, IAALS Executive Director Rebecca Love Kourlis and Rule One Initiative Director Brittany Kauffman discuss how state court and bar leaders across the country are gearing up for major civil justice reforms using the recently released Roadmap for Implementation. The Conference of Chief Justices (CCJ) and the Conference of the State Court Administrators (COSCA) have 13 recommendations for improvements that the Roadmap guides toward implementation, in an effort to ensure that the legal system is serving those who need it.

Our O’Connor Advisory Committee (OAC) members are sounding the alarm about a growing and concerning pattern: state lawmakers all but declaring war on our courts. In defense of America’s system of checks and balances, the OAC banded together on an op-ed that ran in the Arizona Republic last week. In “If you like checks and balances, these bills to usurp the courts should worry you,” the OAC explains how legislation in Arizona is an example of the 41 bills introduced in 15 states this year that would “control the ways by which judges reach the bench, unseat judges currently on courts, and generally restrict courts’ jurisdiction and power,” should they become law. They argue that these state bills interfere with the independence of the judiciary and threaten our democracy.

IAALS Executive Director Rebecca Love Korulis wrote in this week's Denver Post, “But in the legal system as in football, the judges on the bench and the referees on the field are charged with enforcing the rules – sometimes in close calls. While we may not like a ruling, we respect and accept the authority of those entrusted with making it.”

The January 2017 edition of Family Court Review is dedicated to the Honoring Families Initiative’s Family Bar Summit: Shaping the System for the Families We Serve. The Summit, held in November 2015, brought together national thought leaders from diverse professional organizations to identify obstacles to serving children and families in separation and divorce matters and explore opportunities for meaningful change.

Reporter Haley Cohen of The Economist recently toured the Center for Out-of-Court Divorce (COCD) in Denver and wrote about her experience in a December article titled Disruptive Innovation: A spate of start-ups offer alternatives to traditional divorce. We’re delighted to see the COCD attract international media attention because its innovative model for separating and divorcing families deserves the exposure.

The results of our Foundations for Practice study continue to reverberate throughout law schools and the legal profession, and the concepts of “The Whole Lawyer and the Character Quotient” are being covered in the press as well.

After the release of the first two reports from our Foundations for Practice project, Law Week Colorado published an article highlighting the groundbreaking findings, which “have the power to radically shift the discussion about what law schools teach and how employers hire."