First, thanks to everyone from the legal education community who submitted sessions for CALIcon17, the 27th Annual CALI Conference for Law School Computing. After a flurry of submissions late last week we have 58 proposed sessions featuring 79 speakers. It’s going to be a great conference. We’re going to be reviewing the proposals over the next few weeks and speakers will be notified by May 3rd if their session(s) are accepted.

As part of the review process we’re asking the community to vote on the sessions they would like to see on the agenda at CALIcon17. Your votes let us know which sessions you would like to see on the conference agenda. Voting is live now and will remain open until
Friday April 21, 2017. The number of votes for a session will be taken into consideration as part of the session acceptance process and to help with scheduling.

To vote you just need to visit the complete session list at http://cca.li/161, click on the session you want to vote for, and give it a thumbs up. You can vote for as many sessions as you’d like.  You do not need to be registered for the conference to vote. All sessions
will be recorded and available online after the conference, so feel free to vote even if you’re not planning on attending in person.

Speakers are free to campaign for votes including using social media to let folks know about the conference. We do ask that you use the hashtag #CALIcon17 in any posts about the conference.

CALIcon17 is Thursday and Friday, June 15 & 16, 2017 at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law Arizona State University, Phoenix AZ.

I gave a short (35 minutes) presentation as part of the AALS Clinical Law Section – Technology Committee Webinar Series today.  The video is embedded above.

The slides are here…  The first slide is a link back to the video.

Deadline: Friday, November 11, 2016 (7pm CST). Email John Mayer (jmayer@cali.org) to submit nominations.

Click here for the current CALI Board of Directors.

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) is seeking nominations of qualified and enthusiastic individuals to fill vacant positions on its Board of Directors. If you know of someone who would like to contribute to the research and development, strategic planning and governance of CALI, then consider nominating them for the CALI Board of Directors.

Please clear it with the person first to make sure they WANT to be nominated. Self-nominations are acceptable.  It helps our process if the nominee provides some background on their interest in CALI’s mission and activities.

REQUIRED INFORMATION

• Name of the nominee
• Phone number of the nominee
• Email address of the nominee
• Institutional affiliation of the nominee
• CV and/or link to home page/bio for the nominee.

Directors are required to attend TWO meetings a year (June during the CALI Conference and January during AALS).

Directors serve on committees at the behest of the President of the Board and work on other projects and issues relating to the governance, strategy-setting and promotion of CALI’s mission and activities.

Directors terms are for three years at which time their service is evaluated by the Nominating Committee along with other nominees. Service on the CALI Board is voluntary and gratis. Travel expenses for the Board meetings can be covered by CALI if institutional support is unavailable.

The list of all nominees will be submitted to the Nomination Committee who will determine a slate of candidates to be presented to the CALI Membership at the Annual Breakfast to be held on Thursday, January 5, 2017, 7:15-8:30 am in San Francisco, CA during AALS.

All nominees will be contacted soon after nominations are closed. Nominees who are chosen by the nominating committee and elected by the membership are required to attend the CALI Board meeting tentatively scheduled for Thursday, January 5, 2017 in San Francisco, CA right after the Membership Breakfast.

CALI is a dynamic and forward-thinking 501(c)(3) non-profit with big plans and big ideas. CALI is supported primarily by membership dues from over 200 US law schools. Qualified Directors should have knowledge and experience that they can contribute to the ongoing dissemination, development and strategic planning towards CALI’s mission.

Some of our projects include:

* CALI LESSONS: CALI publishes over 1,000 web-based tutorials that are used by law students and law faculty at over 200 US law schools.  We are constantly adding new lessons and updating the existing collection.  More information is at www.cali.org/lessons.

* ELECTRONIC CASEBOOKS/EBOOKS: CALI publishes e-casebooks and other legal texts in multiple ebook formats under the eLangdell imprint.  These are distributed under Creative Commons licenses to allow for maximum flexibility for faculty and students to use in their educational endeavors.  More information is at elangdell.cali.org.

* ACCESS TO JUSTICE/EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING: CALI created the A2J Author software platform that is used by legal aid attorneys and law schools to teach their students law process automation.  More information about using A2J Author in law schools is at a2jclinic.classcaster.net.

A reasonably complete list of CALI projects can be found here.

If you have any questions or wish to submit a nominations, contact John Mayer, Executive Director at 312-906-5307 or jmayer@cali.org.

If you ever experience problems with the CALI website or any CALI services, email webmaster@cali.org.

If you had problems logging in to the CALI website starting Sunday, August 21, 2016 in the morning until about 8pm EST, it was a problem on our end. You were not going crazy.  So sorry.  It’s fixed now. 

The problem would manifest as looking like you were banned from the website (how rude!).  Resetting your password would not necessarily have worked.  This would not happen to everyone at once, but intermittently from the user’s viewpoint.

It’s related to our upgrades to the website to require https/ssl on all web traffic.  More security = good.

Sorry about the problems.  If you have problems in the future, don’t hesitate to email webmaster@cali.org if anything at all looks strange or doesn’t work the way it’s should.  Multiple, semi-sentient beings monitor that account – even on weekends.

John Mayer
Executive Director
jmayer@cali.org
312-906-5307 – Office
@johnpmayer – Twitter

This summer, CALI published what we believe to be the first Coloring Book for Legal Education in the eLangdell Press – “What Color is Your C.F.R.?” by Elizabeth Gotauco, Nicole Dyszlewski and Raquel M. Ortiz. It can be downloaded as PDF for free or you can purchase a paper copy here, (which makes it easier to color) here for $3.78 + shipping.

This is a coloring book for adult law students with the goal of experimenting with the new trend in adult coloring books that purport to help deal with anxiety and stress.

Law school can be stressful. What an obvious and uncomplicated statement! Coloring has been found to help calm the mind and even to increase focus.

I will admit to being skeptical when the authors first proposed this book to CALI, but I talked to people who have actually used them and read dozens of articles (just Google “adult coloring books” – turn on “safe search” if you fear what that might retrieve) and you will find that this is a BIG DEAL. I urge you to read a few articles and see for yourself.  It’s not for everyone, but the benefits are real.

CALI has always been about exploring new ideas and technologies. By publishing this book, we can introduce an innovative and potentially useful idea to our membership and law students. The PDF can be printed for free under our Creative Commons license or students can purchase a paperback version.

The legal educational angle is intriguing to me as well. The subject of the drawings are legal research resources and images. Most adult coloring books are designs, patterns and mandalas, but there are books covering all kinds of topics including a Ruth Bader Ginsburg-themed coloring book. The authors wanted to tap into the positive aspects of coloring and remain linked to their educational mission. We hope that the combination results in a fresh viewpoint on the stress of studying the law. Perhaps its just a calming diversion. Either way, it’s a deeply personal experience like meditation or yoga.

I would love to hear about your experiences with this resource. My email is jmayer@cali.org. This is an experiment and we are in uncharted territory and so are open to learn as we go.

Yes, the pics in this post are from the coloring book.   I screencaptured them from the PDF and then imported them into MS Paint and “colored” them with my mouse. ;-)

Statewide Legal Services of Connecticut and CALI have created a new website where lawyers (especially legal aid attorneys), law students and law faculty can create checklists that contain steps in a legal process and links or content that deals with that step in the process. The website is at www.learnthelaw.org because the goal is to encourage users to capture their legal process expertise in the form of checklists and use them as a learning resource for other lawyers, law students and even the public (self representing litigants – a.k.a. SRLs).

Legal problems can be broken down into steps that can occur over a long period of time – weeks, months, even years. The legal aid community and many others have created articles, tools, forms, videos that explain or guide people through individual steps in a legal process. Our idea is that you can organize the steps in a legal process into a checklist and that the individual items either already exist. The creation, collection and authoring of these checklists, itself, is a valuable process for law students and a valuable resource for lawyers practicing in a new area. A legal process checklist could also be useful to SRLs to get an overview of the entirety of their legal situation.

Since the goal is for lawyers and SRLs to “learn” about a legal process, we call these checklists “classrooms”. Perhaps we should’ve stuck with checklists, but we had the learnthelaw.org URL already and it’s more snappy than checklistthelaw.org.

CHECKLISTS CAPTURE EXPERTISE

The Checklist Manifesto

Checklists are like miniature expert systems. Good ones capture condensed and curated knowledge of the expert and act as a guard rail or reminder system or external assistant to users. If you have not read Atul Gawande’s New York Times Bestseller “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right”, I highly recommend it. It was one of the inspirations for this project and I believe there is real power in the use of checklists by lawyers.

A key point of the book is that checklists are great for novices and experts alike. The value to novices should be obvious, but what about experts? Don’t they already know all about the subject area and all the steps? The answer is “yes”, but checklists are a guarantee that steps won’t be overlooked. For lawyers, checklists help …

– insure accuracy
– completeness
– avoid malpractice
– reminder of all require steps
– reminder of all required documents
– indicator of progress being made in a long process
– monitoring of other parties

When you are at your worst, a checklist can backstop you and provide guidance. When you are at your best, the checklist insures you don’t miss anything and make you feel like you are flying.

WHAT ABOUT LAW STUDENTS?

CALI creates tools, services and content that helps law schools teach and law students learn. The act of creating a quality checklist for a legal workflow is a great learning device for law students.

I imagine law faculty assigning a project to students in almost any course to create a learnthelaw.org classroom and then comparing and contrasting the results from different students working on the same problem space. I can also imagine law students working with local legal aid groups to create classrooms for SRLs as a class or probono project.

We have a pie-in-the-sky notion that if we can get a lot of people to create and share a lot of legal process checklists, this “ecology” will yield social sharing benefits. The more people that use shared checklists will result in more refinement, discussion and improvement.

WHY LEARNTHELAW.ORG?

LearnTheLaw.org is a place for the legal aid and legal education communities to share their checklists and develop these ideas further. There is a natural alliance between legal aid and its dearth of resources and legal education and its need for real-world experience to give to law students. CALI has been using technology to leverage that intersection for many years with the A2J Author project. LearnTheLaw.org is a natural growth of those efforts.

LearnTheLaw.org is also a place to document many different legal processes and workflows. The experience might lead to some of these becoming part of an expert system, document automation or other mechanism that improves delivery or access to legal services and education, but before we can do that, we need to learn more about how lawyers think about the steps in a legal process. We hope that LearnTheLaw.org is a place to capture this.

Finally, LearnTheLaw.org is an attempt to create an institutional memory that transcends individual lawyers and legal aid organizations. When people retire or leave for new positions, their experience is often a loss to the organization. What if some of their experience and knowledge could be captured in a semi-structured format, placed in context and preserved for future lawyers, students and SRLs? This would benefit the organization going forward and possibly grow into a valuable institutional memory that can be preserved and be of benefit to the organization.

Big ideas start small and LearnTheLaw.org is a small start, but we have big ambitions. We hope we to add value and capabilities to the website going forward and look forward to integrating the feedback we receive.

Give it a go!