Accomplishments

Aside from our regular educational programming, we also completed several new projects garnering positive feedback.

New Website

As you may have already noticed, we redesigned our website!

Our primary goal for the redesign was to make finding and searching for educational programs and resources easier by:

• integrating new search tools
• updating and removing old content
• modernizing the look for improved readability

Our aim in designing a new, modern look for the website was to complement the School of Law's website, while reflecting our unique mission within the state.

We hope you like it.

Learn more about our new website.

Faculty Development Seminar

It's been a long time since we last offered a faculty development program, so we wanted to hold a new seminar to train a new group of presenters for the New Mexico judiciary.

We took a "nuts and bolts" approach to this year's program by steering away from educational theory and focusing on presentation tools and skills through:

We had a great time developing and implementing this program and hope all the participants enjoyed and learned from it as well.  As always, we were impressed by the talent of the experienced judges and court staff who attended.  We hope to make this a regular program and expand our talented pool of instructors.

Read more about the seminar.

New Magistrate Judges Orientation

Those who have been around for awhile know this is not a new program.  We revamped it this year, however, to provide even more in-depth content.  We expanded the usual intensive five day program to an almost doubled nine day program. The reasons for lengthening the orientation were practical:

• offer new judges detailed instruction on a variety of legal topics;
• allow ample time for them to absorb and practice this information through mock hearings and trials;
• illustrate real-life application of this information through a field trip to a local magistrate court; and
• provide a day of DWI training at the New Mexico Scientific Laboratories and a tour of the DWI testing facilities.

In addition, we added a round table video conference to our spring schedule--several months after the orientation--to give the new judges an opportunity to ask questions of their mentors and other new judges.

Family Law Manual

There was a need in New Mexico for a family law manual and thanks to Jennifer Barlit, Esq., the Third Judicial District Court, and all of the volunteer legal contributors, as well as the State Justice Institute for providing funding, the New Mexico Family Law Manual was created and distributed this year to all appellate and district judges in the state.

As coordinator of this project, Ms. Bartlit's task was to round up legal and judicial experts to contribute articles on family law.  The result is a compilation of articles spanning a wide range of family law topics to be used as a current reference for New Mexico's bench and bar.

View the New Mexico Family Law Manual.

Find other legal manuals.

Program Ratings

Program evaluations are our primary method for tracking the educational effectiveness of our programs. We ask participants of every one of our programs to rate the usefulness of the program content as it pertains to their job.  This year participants gave us an overall rating of 93%, well above our goal of 75%.  Below is a breakdown of ratings by program.

Our aim each year is to improve upon all of our programs, including those receiving perfect scores.  We constantly rework our approaches and agendas to enhance educational effectiveness.

Developing programs which meet the needs of a large and diverse group of participants is particularly challenging.  To help us in improving any of our programs, we are more than open to your suggestions so please contact us.

Learn more about our regular educational offerings.