We don’t talk enough about our accomplishments here at CALI. I believe it is because we are too busy working on the “next thing” and barely pause long enough to get the word out about how other things are going. Technology in legal education is constantly changing, though it does often cycle back around to ideas we had in the past (*cough*, ebooks, distance learning, *cough*).
We’re going to try to change this.
Every week, someone on the CALI staff will write a short blog post for the CALI Spotlight talking about something we did, are working on or thinking about. There are so many interesting conversations between and among the staff and we attend conferences and workshops all the time where we have amazing, fascinating experiences and ideas. We are going to try to capture some of that and share that with you.
Now, what about the numbers?
25 is the number of years that CALI has been holding the Conference for Law School Computing. Realize for a moment how wonderful an accomplishment that is! For 25 years, we have been hosting a meeting of law school Teknoids, librarians, faculty, ed-tech folks, vendors and various and sundry folk with the purpose of sharing ideas, projects, code and camaraderie. An awful lot of the session are up on Youtube too!
250,000 is the number of CALI Excellence for the Future Awards that we will have printed, processed, shipped and posted to the web for 120 different law schools sometime next year. We started these awards to recognize accomplishments by students and to help law schools make that recognition. It’s a perfect project for a consortium of law schools.
2,500,000 is the number of times someone ran an A2J Author Guided Interview in the past years. I expect that most of these were people needing or wanting to solve a legal problem and a friendly and competent legal aid attorney created a Guided Interview that walks them through filling out form or creating a letter or memo or information sheet. I am especially proud of this accomplishment and we are hard at work on the next generation of A2J Author. At this point, over a dozen law schools have used A2J Author in a course taught to law students. The students learned a 21st century practice skill, the legal aid community got some help automating a legal process or court form and some self-representing litigants get some help that they might not have gotten due to the insufficient availability of legal aid resources.
10,000,000 is the number of times a law student ran a CALI lesson in the past 11 years or so. 10 MILLION! That number staggers me and reminds of the tremendous responsibility that we at CALI take very seriously. Faculty are assigning and students and learning from the CALI lessons that we helped produce.
Now, here’s the thing.
CALI did not deliver all those presentations over 25 years of conferences.
CALI did not get the highest grade or make the determination who was the top student in the class. We didn’t even type in the names of the students or the courses they took.
CALI did not design, develop and write the Guided Interviews that were used over 2.5 million times.
CALI did not author the 900+ lessons that were used over 10 MILLION times by law students.
You did that. You faculty, staff and students at law schools that support CALI. We did our part, writing software, organizing caterers and hotels, applying for grants, developing processes and systems that are available and reliable. It’s obvious to say it, but important for us to remember – we would not exist without you.
Thank you!
John Mayer
Executive Director, CALI
jmayer@cali.org
@johnpmayer