CALI Spotlight

It’s Never Too Early in the Semester to Start Taking CALI Lessons

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

If you haven’t been warned yet, law school exams are not like undergraduate exams. If you were able to get by with cramming the night (or even week) before finals, unfortunately that’s not going to work now. Even if it did work for your exams, that’s not the way to retain knowledge – and you’re going to want to remember the law for the bar exam and your future career!

Our user statistics show that most of our lessons runs occur during the “finals rush.” And while CALI Lessons are a good way to prepare for finals, that’s definitely not the only time to take them. They can help you absorb material throughout the semester and be more prepared for class. Not sure where to start? Try our list of CALI lessons cross-referenced to casebooks OR our subject breakdowns.

Even if you’re not ready to do some substantive law exercises, we have some lessons that will help you with the process of absorbing legal information. They are:

How to Brief a Case. Everyone develops their own method eventually on how to take notes for class. This lesson will give you a good starting point so you can make sure that you’re including everything that you’ll need come finals time.
Learning Legal Analysis Through Its Components: Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion – IRAC. The IRAC analysis pattern will help you in reading and deciphering cases as well as in your LRW and final exam writings.
Plagarism – Keeping Out of Trouble. Finally, as with everything else in law school, you may find that academic honesty and honor codes are much tougher and strictly enforced than in undergrad. This lesson can help you stay out of Honor Council hearings from an inadvertent mistake.

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Your CALI Account and You – Webinar this Friday!

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

The past few weeks have been busy. So many things to do, so many new people to meet, new classes and new schedules. Is there something that you’re forgetting? Something like, oh, I don’t know…..

Registering for CALI?

Registering for CALI is fast and easy, but just in case you want to see what you’re getting into, we’re going to have a webinar on Friday, September 5 at 1pm Central Time. It’s totally free, but requires pre-registration at this link. It’ll be quick too – only about 20 minutes. If you’ve already registered for CALI, we’ll also be covering how to do things like recover your password, edit your existing account and why it’s important to do so.

See you then!

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2015 Federal Rules Books by the Legal Information Institute

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

CALI is happy to announce the release of the updated versions of the Federal Rules of Evidence, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure via our eLangdell Press bookstore. These books are published in cooperation with and powered by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. The Legal Information Institute is a pioneer in the world of Free and Open Law. In continuation of that work, these books are absolutely free for anyone to download and use.

All of the books contain the following features:

The complete rules as of December 1, 2014 (for the 2015 edition).
All notes of the Advisory Committee following each rule.
Internal links to rules referenced within the rules.
External links to the LII website’s version of the US Code.

If you’d like to thank the LII for providing the material for these books, they gratefully accept donations to support their operations. No amount is too small.

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Start Law School Off Right!

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

Did you know CALI has resources that not only help you learn the law, but also ones that help you learn how to be a better student? It’s true!

Law School Materials for Success, written by Dean Barbara Glesner Fines, is an book and podcast series filled with tips and tricks to make the law school experience as painless as possible.

The first year of law school is, for many people, one of the most significant transitions of their adult life. Law school demands a lot as it helps you make the transition from your prior identity as student (or as some other occupational role) to your new identity as an attorney.

To meet the demands of law school, it is often helpful to have the big picture before you begin – a sense of what it is you are trying to do as you prepare for classes, participate in those classes, review and prepare for exams, take exams, and then begin the cycle once again.

Law School Materials for Success is designed to give you the essentials of that process. It is purposefully brief – most law students do not have the time for an extensive examination of the study of law school. Rather, they need a source for some basic, critical advice and some pointers on where to go for more if necessary. That is what this book and the accompanying podcasts are designed to provide.

The book is available for free download on its eLangdell Bookstore page and the podcasts are available from Lawdibles.Classcaster.net.

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What the Heck is CALI???

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

Greetings to new and returning law students and faculty! I know this month is filled with new, exciting (and maybe even scary) changes. It’s also filled with INFORMATION OVERLOAD. In case you missed it, hopefully in your orientation materials there was either a cellophane pack of “Time Trial” cards with a code card facing out or just a single business card with CALI on it.

They will look like this:

These are very important! Why? Because they contain the Authorization Code you need to register for CALI and get access to over 900 FREE interactive lessons on a wide variety of law school course topics. CALI Lessons are a great tool to help you supplement your course readings and test yourself on your comprehension. And did we mention that they are absolutely free for you to use thanks to your school’s membership in CALI? And that you can pick which lesson to take via our Casebook Correlation charts?

So you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Okay, CALI, I’m in. How do I register?” Excellent! Registration is very easy and should take about 2 minutes. Before you get started you need two things: (1) Your school’s authorization code and (2) an email address. Yep, that’s it!

Okay, to start you will go to www.cali.org. In the top right hand side of the page, there is a link to register. (Shown below.) Click that or alternatively you can just go right to www.cali.org/register.

That will take you to the registration page. It looks like this:

Two things to remember:

(1) Make sure your authorization code is accepted by the site. You’ll know it is when you are asked to pick a graduating class date. You may have to click outside of the box to get the process started. It usually takes just a few seconds, but during the back to school rush, sometimes it may take up to a minute.

(2) Use a valid email address. We generally don’t email students unless it is a site maintenance emergency, but if you forget your password, the system sends out an email for you to reset it.

That’s pretty much it. Register once and then for the rest of your law school career you can use CALI lessons as often as you like. If you have any questions or issues, please don’t hesitate to contact us! We are here to help you get through law school.

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Check out the New CALI Website! Webinars available.

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

You may have noticed that CALI updated it’s website inside and out this summer. And by “may have noticed” I mean “you probably muttered to yourself ‘where the heck did they put…’ while trying to do something on the site.”

CALI will be offering two webinars – one on Tuesday, August 12 at 10:30 Central and one on Thursday, August 14 at 2:30 Central – that will give you the grand tour of the website and see all the bells and whistles. There will also be time for your questions. The webinar will be hosted by Sarah Glassmeyer, CALI’s Director of Community Development and we’ll be joined by CALI’s Director of Internet Development Elmer Masters.

Registration for these webinars is absolutely free and open to everyone. However, you must register first. Link to the registration forms:

Tuesday, August 12 at 10:30 am CDT

Thursday, August 14 at 2:30 pm CDT

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We’re Rolling out A2J Author Version 5.0!!!

Posted on July 31, 2014 by John Mayer

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) and the Center for Access to Justice and Technology at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law (CAJT) will be rolling out the new version of A2J Author® for the legal aid community this Friday, August 1, 2014 at 12 noon CST.

(Edited to add: There will be two webinars on Friday, August 1 about A2JAuthor 5. They are at 11:00 AM Central and 3:00 PM Central. Free but pre-registration required using those links.)

A2J Author® is a software tool that delivers greater access to justice for self-represented litigants by enabling non-technical authors from the courts, clerk’s offices, legal services programs, and website editors to rapidly build and implement customer friendly web-based interfaces for document assembly. With this technology, the legal aid community has delivered over 2.5 million interactions with users seeking assistance in a legal matter for themselves.ⁱThe community of authors of A2J Author Guided Interviews should be proud of this accomplishment. But we are really only getting started.

(Interesting to note, a recent article about LegalZoom mentioned that they had served over 2 million people and the company had expected revenues in 2012 of $200 million. A2J Author is provided at no cost to legal non-profits and government agencies.)ⁱⁱ

A New Website and Authoring System

This Friday, we will be throw the switch and a2jauthor.org will point to the new website and the new authoring system. The old website will not go away for at least a year and will continue to be accessible at old.a2jauthor.org while we are updating the content on the new website. You will still be able to download and install A2J Author version 4 for at least 6 months (and probably longer) while we work with LHI to bring up the new Viewer and help everyone transition their A2J4 Guided Interviews into A2J5 Guided Interviews.

A2J Author Guided Interviews are stored as XML files. The format of those files is different between version 4 and version 5. This was unavoidable. We have done considerable work in the background to make the conversion of A2J4 interview files into A2J5 format, but some human intervention will still be necessary to make your interviews run in the new viewer. We will be posting detailed information about this and holding several webinars that explain the process in the near future. We are working hard to make this transition smooth, but there will be bumps along the way.

The next several months we will be shaking out the new system and you can help by uploading your A2J4 Guided Interviews and testing them in the new A2J5 Viewer. We crave your feedback so that we can refine and adjust the new platform for when it goes live with real people on LHI later this year.

This is not an upgrade, this is a whole, new platform. I want to see 20 million people served per year and even more. Access to justice isn’t just about quantity, but quantity does matter. Our goal is not to replace lawyers, but to make the limited human lawyer resources more valuable by concentrating their work where it can have the greatest impact. Technology vs. Lawyers is not an either/or proposition. The greatest benefit will come from our strategic and intelligent use of Technology + Lawyers to increase access to justice.

Technological Information

Almost 10 years ago in December of 2004, we rolled out the first version of A2J Author. A2J Author versions 1 through 4 were written in Actionscript and were wrapped in a Visual Basic shell. The viewer was a combination of Actionscript and some small Javascript. You could only create new Guided Interviews® on Microsoft Windows PCs, but you could run a Guided Interview on any machine that had a web browser and the Flash plugin installed. This was the time of the browser wars.ⁱⁱⁱMozilla Firefox 1.0 was released in November, 2004 and it was near impossible to deliver a consistent and reliable experience on different browsers. Flash was the best solution at the time. Also, Apple Mac market share in law schools was below 10% with no expectation that it would every rise again.^iv This was before the iPod, iPad and iPhone.

Today, however, things are different. HTML, JavaScriptandCSSform a very capable development environment for Single Page Applications (SPAs).^v Macs represent over 50% of the PCs visiting the CALI website^viand Flash is persona non grata on Apple iPhones and iPads and problematic on other smartphones.

The new version of A2J Author is a single page web application designed to run in modern browsers and does not require a software package to be downloaded and installed on the author’s machine. This is because the software that runs the application is downloaded every time you visit the website. This has the advantage of allowing for rapid and continuous bug fixes and feature enhancements. It also means that A2J Author will work on your PC whether it runs Windows, Mac or Linux. The viewer is also a (smaller) single page web application that runs inside the browser and (will soon) be able to do so on smart phones and tablets as long as they continue to support modern web browser standards.

Thanks to LSC for funding this, LHI as our partners in crime and the Legal Aid community for their ongoing support.

TL;DR / In Summary

On Friday, August 1, 2014, a2jauthor.org will point to the new website and new authoring system.
Everyone will have to create a brand new account on that website to be able to create new Guided Interviews and upload old interviews for conversion into the new version 5 format.
The old website will still be accessible at old.a2jauthor.org for at least a year.
You cannot run A2J5 Guided Interviews at LHI or on your own servers (e.g. online intake) just yet. We are working with LHI with a Fall 2014 time frame and hope to have a download package for putting interviews on your own server for the folks doing online intake and the like.
The mobile version of the A2J5 Viewer is still under construction. We hope to deliver that this fall as well.
We are also working on a basic document assembly subsystem for A2J Author but do not have an estimate time of completion just yet.
The new A2J5 Viewer will support Korean, Spanish, English, Simplified Chinese^vii and French (in progress) right away.
The new A2J5’s logic will support nested IF and ELSE’s too

.. but WAIT, there’s MORE. Seriously. We will be talking about this a lot more in the future. Follow us on Twitter @A2JAuthor and @CALIorg.

As always, if you have any questions, ideas, suggestions, praise or complaints, do not hesitate to contact me directly.

John Mayer
Executive Director
CALI
jmayer@cali.org
@johnpmayer

ENDNOTES

i.Based on the latest statistics reporting from LHI which hosts the majority of the A2J Author Guided Interviews available. http://www.probono.net/dasupport/news/article.519725-LHI_Newsletter_April_2014

ii. http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/latest_legal_victory_has_legalzoom_poised_for_growth#368486 “… As of August 2012, it had served some 2 million customers, according to a prospectus it filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in advance of a planned initial public offering. In 2011, it brought in revenues of $156 million and was on track to bring in close to $200 million in 2012…”

iii. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#The_second_browser_war

iv. http://www.theoligarch.com/microsoft_vs_apple_history.htm

v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-page_application and http://www.manning.com/mikowski/ – the latter is an excellent book on Single Page Web Applications.

vi.According to my webmaster and our web logs in the Spring of 2014.

vii. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters

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CALI Lesson Teaching Guides

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

Faculty members logging into CALI this week will see a new box on the upper left hand side of each lesson page. (It’s also visible here, on the upper left hand side of this blog post.) As you can see, it’s titled “Teaching Guide.” This box, viewable only to faculty, contains links to all the tools we have to enhance the CALI Lesson experience for faculty and (hopefully) make it easier to assign CALI lessons.

Here’s a brief rundown of what each link does:

Faculty View – This puts the entire CALI lesson (including answers) on one HTML page. This makes it easier to review the lesson and provides the ability to print it out, if you would like to review it that way.
Lesson Mapper – the CALI Author software that powers CALI lessons allows for very sophisticated branching and logic. Remember “Choose Your Own Adventure” books? It’s like that. The Lesson Mapper is a visual guide to how the pages of the lesson interact with each other and the flow and branches of the lesson.
Download – Did you know that faculty can edit and privately republish CALI lessons? Well, you can! This link will download a zip file of the lesson and it’s images. You’ll need to download CALI Author in order to edit the lesson, but then you are free to change it to suit your needs. This FAQ on AutoPublish has more information.
LessonLink – LessonLink turns CALI Lessons from a student study aid into a faculty assessment tool. It gives CALI lessons a special URL that will allow the faculty member that created the LessonLink the ability to view each student’s score down to a question by question basis. And it can be done with a simple push of a button!

We are always trying to make CALI more user friendly. If you have any questions or enhancements that you’d like to see, please contact us at feedback@CALI.org

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Where are the ALWD Lessons?

Posted on July 10, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

A very popular resource on the CALI.org website has been the four lessons that decipher and explain the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) Guide to Legal Citation. They were assigned by all sorts of courses, from basic legal research to advanced seminars.

So why did we remove them?

Well, quite simply, they were out of date. CALI lessons are not just written and reviewed by law professors, but also revised by them to remain current. Our lessons were for the 4th edition of the ALWD Guide. The new 5th edition has just been released and not only does it contain significant changes, but it also comes with an online companion that effectively eliminates the need for CALI lessons. Thus, a decision has been made to remove the lessons permanently instead of revising them.

If you would like more assistance with legal citation, please check out Prof. Peter Martin’s free Introduction to Basic Legal Citation available in the eLangdell Press bookstore.

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CALIcon14 is a Wrap!

Posted on June 23, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

Yes, another CALIcon has come and gone. Thank you so much for attending! I kept hearing the phrase “my people” in sessions and hallways of CALIcon and that’s ultimately what CALI and CALIcon is about – Community. And we couldn’t have one without you.

Personally, I thought it was a great one, but who really cares what I think? Not many people, I tell you what. What do you think??? TELL US. That’s the only way we can make future CALIcons better. There is a survey at http://surveys.cali.org/public/survey.php?name=CALICon14 for you to take and let us know what you would like to see at future CALIcons. If you think of something else later on, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line and tell us later (http://www.cali.org/content/contact-cali-staff) . CALI is a consortium and we’re here to serve you.

Huge, huge, HUGE thank yous to the following people:

1) The librarians, faculty and staff of our hosts Harvard Law School and Harvard Law School Library. A special shout out to Gail Harris, who was our point person at HLS. She was amazing and we could have not done it without her.

2) Our sponsors – Hein, BloombergBNA, ThomsonReuters, Interpid, Extegrity, ExamSoft, CLIO, Appointlink/MyLaw2.0, Electronic BlueBook, Quimbee, and the Free Law Coalition – Justia, LII, Oyez and Public.Resource.org.

3) Our fabulous keynote speakers Jason Scott and Dorothea Salo. And all session speakers as well. If it weren’t for you, CALIcon would just be three days of Mayer dancing around in costumes. Could you do us a favor? Will all speakers please upload their slides/materials to the pages of their sessions? We will also be posting the video recordings of the sessions on these pages soon. There is a 1-5 flame voting system in place on these pages as well if you would like to rate them.

And finally, thank you to all my coworkers, with special mentions to CALI staff members LaVonne Molde and Elmer Masters. They handle the bulk of CALIcon planning, with LaVonne overseeing logistics and Elmer the content.

You may have won a raffle prize – I will be contacting the winners of those who had to leave early and sending those prizes on. And finally, if you missed the online action, Rob Richards has graciously collected the #CALIcon14 tweets and storified them for us (http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/calicon-2014-conference-for-law-school-computing-storify-tweets-and-resources/) .

See you next year in Denver, CO!!! The University of Denver Sturm Law School will be our hosts.

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