Spotlight Blog

CALI partners with Chicago-Kent's Access to Justice & Technology on A2J Author, software that lets lawyers create computer-based interviews. A2J interviews simplify the court system for self-represented litigants by turning legal documents into an easy-to-understand series of questions. We're very excited about New York State Courts Access to Justice Program's new Best Practices Guide for Using A2J Author. Court systems interested in implementing A2J Author should check it out.

CALI has a few helpful how-to videos that help students complete the most common issues they run into on The CALI website. Check out - or point your students to - these videos if you're new to the website and need to register, have created an account as a guest and need access to the lessons, or need to retrieve your cali.org password. See them all below...

Congrats to a prolific CALI lesson author, and our former board president, Barbara Glesner Fines for being named one of the 23 Law Profs to Take Before You Die by the National Jurist. Here's a list of the fine CALI Lessons Professor Glesner Fines has written for us, mostly in Professional Responsibility and Remedies. 

The CALI Excellence for the Future Awards website is back up and running.  If your school is interested in participating in the awards program (free to US law schools), contact John Mayer at jmayer@cali.org. 

It's a little easier to see that CALI has a bunch of state-specific legal research lessons. Have a look at our new legal research lessons map to find your state's lessons.

Is your state not available? We have plenty of non-state specific legal research lessons. And if you know a law librarian in your state, have them contact us if they're interested in authoring a lesson for your state.

I am delighted to be invited to the AALL Vendor Colloquium next week as a “stakeholder”. I have a growing sense of unease about the relationship between legal information vendors and the law libraries, law students and law schools. This meeting has challenged me to articulate those thoughts. [Read on for more...]

We're trying out a fun, new idea for law libraries: LibTour - a virtual audio tour of law libraries. One thing about LibTour: we've QR Coded each of the audio files (QR codes are becoming a popular way for folks to access information and data from smartphones, on the spot). Read on for more...

Now that we've sent notice to schools and it has shown up on the blogs, we want to acknowledge here that, yes, CALI member dues for law schools will be going up over the next two years. We plan to deliver more content to you, our members, with this increased contribution. Most notably: five eLangdell casebooks a year and more CALI lessons. We want the changes that lie ahead to be as transparent as possible. So please contact us with feedback and questions. Read on for more details and reasoning in our Executive Director's letter to membership.

We're now accepting session proposals for the 21st Annual Conference for Law School Computing at Marquette University Law School, June 23-25, 2011. The theme for this year's conference is...UNBOUND (help decide the colors). Read the full call for speakers from CALI Executive Director, John Mayer...

We have this summer's CALI Conference theme: "UNBOUND." Why did we choose UNBOUND? Read more to find out.

A new chapter is available in eLangdell, our open casebook initiative: The Ethics of Tax Lawyering by Michael Hatfield. Faculty can adopt it, and students can use it, for free in a bunch of different formats: on iPads, Kindles, and even as a PDF for easy printing. There is a faculty version with notes available.

The Law School Tech Talk podcast will be talking with John Mayer, our Executive Director, live on Monday, 1/31 at Noon EST/11 CDT. He'll be talking about eLangdell - our electronic casebook initiative - and this summer's CALI conference, among other CALI projects. Attending the live broadcast is free.

We've finally dived head first into 2006 and made all CALI video and past CALI webinars available on the most popular video site on the planet. YouTube granted us a nonprofit account, which means no time limits (time limits were why we chose blip.tv as our original video host). So you can subscribe and peruse the archives on CALI's YouTube channel.

We're about to publish casebooks that are free for law students and law professors to use on multiple formats (iPad, Kindle, PDF, etc.). AALS meeting attendees got a preview of some casebook chapters, and now you can, too, at elangdell.cali.org.

Your reaction to eLangdell has been overwhelmingly positive. Read some early write-ups and mentions here, here, and here. We especially like this part from The Librarian at Law. Read it below...

If you're in San Francisco for the 2010 AALS Annual Meeting this year, you should stop by and say hi to the staff at CALI's exhibitor booth. We'll all be there! Ask us about our electronic casebook initiative, eLangdell, if you're interested in adopting open casebooks that are freely available to your students. We'll also be demoing a new version of CALI lessons (hint: this version is compatible with iPads and smartphones).