This online course is approved for 3.25 CLE Hours, 1 hour Ethics approved, with the Iowa Supreme Court Commission on Continuing Education Legal Education.  Once you have registered and submitted payment for the course, you will be emailed instructions on viewing the content.  A CLE certificate of attendance will be issued once you have completed viewing the content.

Self-represented parties create special challenges for members of the administrative law judiciary. Our first presenter, Kelly Tait, is a communication consultant and adjunct professor of Communications Studies at the University of Nevada-Reno. She will provide tools and techniques to help judges overcome the challenges posed by parties who are unrepresented by attorneys and maintain the core judicial functions of access to justice and neutrality. She is one of the co-authors of the U.S. bench book “Handling Cases Involving Self-Represented Litigants: A National Bench Guide for Judges.”

Being considered a “true professional” is the highest compliment that a judge can receive and should be what we inspire to be every day. Our second presenter, Katherine Kwan MacDonald, is an assistant chief administrative law judge with the California Public Utilities Commission and teaches the ethics session in the National Judicial College’s Fair Hearing course. Judge MacDonald will help us to identify and resolve common ethical issues that we as judges are confronted with in our work to achieve the core judicial function of professionalism.