NITA Earns Top Awards from ACLEA

The Association for Continuing Legal Education (ACLEA) honored NITA with the Award for Professional Excellence for its book, Winning at Trial by D. Shane Read and the Award for Outstanding Achievement for its 2008 Brand Campaign Design: The Journey. ACLEA grants only 15 annual awards to competitors representing more than 300 organizations.

The Award for Professional Excellence is the top prize; only one is awarded in each category of prizes. ACLEA will formally present the awards to NITA at the Annual Meeting of ACLEA in Vancouver, British Columbia on August 5, 2008.

Winning at Trial, the winning text, encapsulates every litigator’s fundamental aspiration. The book includes two DVDs containing almost four hours of footage from the O. J. Simpson trial and a focus group deliberating a civil trial (440 pp., two DVDs, 2007, ISBN 978-1-60156-001-8, $75.00).

The “Journey” brand campaign has been a centerpiece of NITA’s marketing and communications pieces in 2008. E-mails, brochures, catalogs, and other pieces of collateral have included this theme in both imagery and copy. Given that participation across NITA’s public and public service programs is up year to year over 2007, the 2008 Journey campaign is a likely contributing factor.

How to Try a Jury Case

How to Try a Jury Case: Trial Tactics, by John F. Kimberling, recently published by NITA, has been well-received by the legal community. The following reviews underscore that the practical advice it offers deems it an important addition to any trial lawyer’s bookshelf.

“…a must-read for all trial lawyers, whether the lawyer is new to the practice or simply want to brush up on some trial techniques…replete with tips that only a seasoned trial advocate can provide.”
--Trial, May 2008

“Kimberlings’s trial manual permits a new trial attorney to gain practical knowledge and insight that can be obtained only from years of success and mistakes as a trial attorney…a highly recommended read.”
The Colorado Lawyer, April 2008

Temple's Law Library Blog

Temple’s Law Library Blog wrote a generous description of NITA’s new case file, State v. Tyler by John F. Francis. To read this and other posts about NITA publications visit the Trial Advocacy Blog.

Carnegie Report Reinforces the NITA Mission

A Special Perspective from NITA’s Educational Consultant, Jeanne Philotoff

As mentioned in our recent post, The Carnegie Report, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released a report in March 2007 that reinforces what the McCrate Report found in 1992 and what the NITA faculty and staff have known for decades. The message: legal skills training must become an essential part of law school curriculum. Legal education needs to evolve to become more linked to the practical requirements of practicing law.

Most people familiar with NITA know that we started as a task force of the American Bar Association. The success of NITA was immediate. It must be noted that many of our original programs took place at the law schools where these very discussions on learning-by-doing are taking place today. You could (and in most cases, can still) find us at Hofstra, SMU, Nova Southeastern, Northwestern, Loyola/LA, Loyola/CA, University of Washington, and the University of California at San Diego, to name just a few. We created a mission that organizations believed in and were determined to become apart of. Materials were needed to train our participants and soon the law schools looked to NITA for the role-playing exercises needed to test the skills that faculty were trying to develop in their students.

Most graduates report that they are able to incorporate into practice the legal skills they’ve developed in school during their summer associate experiences after their first and second years of law school. It is this experience, and the fact they show themselves to be capable in the art of advocacy, that has the greatest influence on their career paths.

The Carnegie report suggests that the third year be designed as a kind of “capstone” opportunity for students to develop specialized advanced clinical training. Most schools now limit this opportunity to a few lucky students. We, like the Carnegie Foundation, would like to see this change.

Together, we can provide the quality education that our law students need and that their future clients deserve. NITA programs and publications can serve as a guide and catalyst toward a fundamental shift in law school curriculum. Integrating theory and practice, the abstract and the practical is of paramount importance.