As you may know, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS), is a “national, independent research center dedicated to facilitating continuous improvement and advancing excellence in the American legal system.”  It is an impressive, high-powered organization based in the University of Denver.

It just released a new report entitled, Change the System, Change the Culture: Top 10 Cultural Shifts Needed to Create the Courts of Tomorrow.

The report argues that a culture shift is needed:

The challenge in addressing these issues lies not only in crafting solutions — it is also overcoming lawyers’ and judges’ strong and well-documented resistance to change.  Efforts to reduce cost and delay face inertia and attachment to the status quo.  In addition, anecdotal evidence clearly establishes that “a strong cultural bias limits the ability of individuals to look at an old problem in a new way.” (Footnotes omitted)

The report identifies 10 critical shifts including “Dig Deep, Earlier: Lawyers need to develop a deep understanding of their case early in the process.”  It argues:

Lawyers must focus on the case at the very beginning, identifying the issues in the case and then developing a pretrial plan focused on those specific issues.  When this approach is employed, lawyers can determine the extent to which it would be more efficient to phase discovery, dispense with depositions or motions practice, or otherwise proceed in a way that gets to resolution for their clients.  Understanding the case as much as possible as early in the process as possible allows a lawyer to design the process in a way that best serves the client and the system.

This is precisely the approach reflected in the work on planned early dispute resolution (PEDR), described in my article with Peter Benner, Why and How Businesses Use Planned Early Negotiation.