2015-2020 Strategic Plan

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indiana university maurer school of law strategic plan 2015 -2020


our vision To be an exceptional global law school that benefits Indiana, the nation, and the world. We fulfill this vision by recruiting and then launching the professional careers of some of the world’s most promising students, and by recruiting outstanding faculty and staff who are committed to their students and to advancing knowledge, and who understand the key role law plays in society.

our mission The mission of our Law School is to make a transformative contribution to the lives of our students and to serve society more broadly. We meet these goals through advancing understanding of the law and legal institutions, fostering deep engagement with our community, and educating and providing opportunities for our students so they may become accomplished, ethical leaders and professionals.


our values Since its founding, the Law School has committed itself to a set of enduring values. Core values which underscore our strategic plan include: – Excellence and innovation – Continued improvement and self-assessment – A global perspective – Academic freedom and curiosity – Academic and personal integrity – Interdisciplinarity and collaboration – Diversity and inclusiveness – Paying forward and giving back – Collegiality – Entrepreneurialism – Transparency A particular mindset and character that we cultivate in our students underscore and give meaning to these values. We seek exceptional students who are collegial, lack pretense, and have deep integrity — what we have referred to in the past as “aptitude without attitude.” We aim for them to achieve their goals through dedication, hard work, and a love of learning. We value these characteristics in our faculty, our staff, and our alumni, too. Cultivating this mindset and character in all who are connected with the school is one way we run an exceptional Law School, and help cultivate the next generation of leaders.

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CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT: MAXWELL HALL, THE LAW SCHOOL’S HOME FROM 1908-1956; THE CURRENT LAW SCHOOL BUILDING (NAMED BAIER HALL IN 2015) DURING CONSTRUCTION; THE JEROME HALL LAW LIBRARY BEFORE AND AFTER ITS 1986 EXPANSION.


dean’s foreword This Strategic Plan is the result of more than a year-long process. The plan has aspirational and visionary elements, but it also carefully assesses our comparative strengths in areas designed to meet the demands of a rapidly changing world. It provides a framework that will guide the Maurer School of Law’s leadership in launching the professional careers of some of the world’s most promising students, in strengthening our research and scholarly excellence, and in expanding service to our communities. Accordingly, the plan is a forward-looking document that sets forth bold priorities and specific actions to be accomplished in time for the University’s Bicentennial in 2020. I am pleased that the Strategic Plan has been written from a position of strength, not weakness, and is focused on opportunity, not crisis. At a time when many law schools seem to have adopted programs out of anxiety-driven urgency, our plan seeks to capitalize on opportunities to move forward in a substantial way. The plan sets forth concrete steps for us to continue to be Indiana’s preeminent law school and to garner even greater national and global prominence as one of the world’s very best public law schools. Drafting the plan was a community-wide effort, for which I am grateful. Faculty spent significant time meeting and discussing the opportunities and challenges before us. Senior staff reviewed several drafts and students provided input, with the Dean’s Student Advisory Committee particularly taking a leadership role. Alumni were also heavily involved, and our Alumni Board and Board of Visitors played a particularly key role in formulating the contours of this plan. I appreciate the deep engagement of everyone who contributed. Lastly, I’m cognizant of the plan’s limits, and the difference between this formal plan and operational strategy. Good strategy is a dynamic force that constantly seeks new opportunities and identifies initiatives that can be capitalized on swiftly and effectively. This plan, however, depicts a framework of excellence. It is through this framework that we seek to maintain the trajectory of this great school. We now move into the implementation phase. Many of the details will be more fully developed in the coming year, with faculty, staff, students, and alumni intensively involved in the process.

Austen Parrish Dean and James H. Rudy Professor of Law Indiana University Maurer School of Law May 2015

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introduction Over the past decade, the Law School has grown greatly in reputation and prestige. We have recruited outstanding students, hired talented staff, and nurtured extraordinary faculty members who are at the forefront of their respective fields. At the same time, we have cultivated our academic leadership and actively engaged our alumni in areas such as admissions and career services. More than ever, our graduates have gone on to sustained professional and personal success, even in tough economic times.

“ An overarching theme for this plan is to increase our impact both globally and locally as a way to expand our contributions to society.�


THE 2005 STRATEGIC PLAN Central to the Law School’s success was a multi-tiered strategy, set forth in our 2005 Strategic Plan. In the years following the Plan, the school recruited talented faculty and provided support to improve faculty visibility and impact. The school encouraged and incentivized interdisciplinary and collaborative research and teaching, and further integrated a global perspective into the intellectual community. The school established centers of excellence that drove faculty research and creativity, and we committed ourselves to a revitalized curriculum that would meet the changing needs of the profession. The school also implemented new programs and approaches to recruit the very top students. The strategy worked. The Law School achieved national recognition for being at the vanguard of changes in legal education, with significant publicity around what was, at the time, an innovative approach to the first-year curriculum. The school was successful with its new approaches to student recruitment, and entering student credentials rose steadily. Nationally, its reputation grew as one of the best public law schools in the nation. In its largest-ever capital campaign, the school was named and more than $90 million was raised for student scholarships, faculty support, and programmatic innovations.

NEW CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES But the world has changed since our last formal Strategic Plan. While the Law School’s successful past has created new hopes and high expectations, the legal profession and legal education face challenges. Our plan recognizes and confronts head-on the major challenges: increasingly fierce competition to attract the best students; the need to deliver more cost-effectively the highest quality instruction and learning; a changing and weaker job market resulting in fewer traditional entry-level positions in large law firms; and competition in recruiting and retaining talented faculty members who can make an impact, while serving as role models and mentors in our community. We meet these challenges against a backdrop of sharp reductions nationally in law school applications, resulting in tighter resource constraints.

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Yet, while cognizant of changes in the world and the impact of market forces, we do not accept the seemingly prevailing wisdom of some in the national media who take a dim view of law, lawyers, and law schools. The profession of law remains a strong path to personal and professional success, and legal education remains transformative for many. The legal profession has long been intimately involved in leading this country: lawyers served as more than half of the members of the Constitutional Convention, nearly half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and twenty-six of the United States’ forty-three presidents. Law graduates play key roles in various civic organizations, in their places of work, and in their communities. Law schools and law faculty, too, play a special role in democratic society and in preserving the rule of law. Only with sustained scholarly effort do we unearth credible solutions to society’s most pressing problems. Our scholarly and creative activities not only advance knowledge, but also influence judges, lawyers, legislators, and regulators in reforming, interpreting, and preserving existing law, and these activities generate theories that can fundamentally change our thinking about the law and legal institutions. Firmly convinced of this role for law, we have a vision for legal education that takes us beyond what many attempt and is, in part, what makes us a top-tier, highly selective law school. Our plan focuses not only on how we educate our students, but on the broader role our faculty and school 6

play as part of the Indiana University Bloomington campus, and the impact we have in Indiana, the nation, and the world. Our course for the Law School builds upon, complements, and embraces the recently articulated Bloomington campus and university bicentennial strategic plans.

A PLAN FOR FUTURE EXCELLENCE Part of our plan reaffirms our commitment to a well-rounded and integrated academic program. We are committed to providing our students with a strong foundation of legal theory, legal method, reasoning, and analysis, and a deep understanding of law across a wide variety of subject areas. We believe this kind of well-rounded legal education is essential to preparing our students for a lifetime in the law. We therefore reaffirm the bold idea


that great law schools are scholarly institutions that belong within great research universities. We reject the alternative view, sometimes advanced in the national media, of law schools as mere vocational trade schools, whose purpose is to have students obtain narrow technical mastery for specific legal careers. We have grander ambitions than simply preparing students for their first job. We equally reject the idea that preparing students for practice is somehow a new idea. We have long provided meaningful and sophisticated clinical, simulation, and experiential opportunities that expose students to, and teach them, lawyering skills. Only by fully educating students in the theory, as well as the practice, of the law do we ensure that when our students graduate, they are prepared to meet the increasingly complex demands of the profession.

We also believe in an integrated approach to legal education. We remain convinced that a proper legal education requires: (a) a strong emphasis on the study of the legal profession itself, including especially the fundamental norms, ethics, and values of the profession; (b) a deep understanding of

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STUDENTS RELAX IN THE JEROME HALL LAW LIBRARY — OUR STUDENT COMMONS.


MEMBERS OF THE FIRST-YEAR CLASS TAKE A PROFESSIONALISM OATH DURING ORIENTATION.

law and an awareness of, and appreciation for, the myriad ways that knowledge and insights derived from other scholarly disciplines across the university can help us better understand the law, its impact upon society, and society’s impact on law; and (c) the well-developed capability to think about, and practice, law in a global setting. We embrace these commitments recognizing the need for constant re-evaluation, using the latest pedagogical and technological approaches to best prepare our graduates

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for long-term life success. These commitments are a large part of what makes a legal education from our Law School valuable and enables our graduates to enjoy rich and rewarding professional lives. Our approach applies not just to our JD students. Law permeates everyday personal and business decisions and public policy choices in an increasingly wide range of areas. The world needs more legal education, not less. We therefore are committed to being the place at the university that provides graduate legal education both to aspiring lawyers and to non-lawyers, from the U.S. and abroad. We will provide executive education and non-degree opportunities to professionals seeking a better understanding of legal issues, launch a wider offering of specialized masters and LLM programs, and assist Indiana University in exposing talented undergraduate students to the law through certificate programs.


Yet our plan is not focused solely on how we educate our students. Equally important are the contributions the school makes to the economic and social well-being of the nation. Although we are global and national in orientation, we also have a deep and abiding commitment to Indiana. We therefore seek ways for our faculty, through their research, service, and community activities — including collaboration with students, practitioners, and leaders in other parts of the university and other fields — to serve society and in so doing more sharply distinguish ourselves. While we have long been the state’s flagship school and one of the top public law schools in the nation, we now have programs in information privacy and cybersecurity, intellectual property, rule of law and constitutional design, the global legal profession, and law and society, among other areas, that rival, and in some cases surpass, the most elite in the country. Through centers and programs, world-class researchers work hand-in-hand with students on cutting-edge issues to help solve real-world problems. We also will play an important role in helping the campus address the Grand Challenges Initiatives that attack big questions and whose answers lie beyond the frontiers of current knowledge. We seek therefore to continue to maintain and build on an internationally known faculty whose research and scholarship will aid in our understanding of law and legal institutions, and contributes

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to resolving the leading issues of the day. We aim to hire faculty in research fields where the Law School will build on its comparative advantage, helping to distinguish the contributions the Maurer School of Law makes from those of other leading law schools. Finally, how we operate — fostering a culture of collegiality, integrity, and hard-work ethic within the school — is just as important as what occurs in the classroom. Often these key operational aspects are overlooked in higher education strategic planning. That’s a mistake. A first-rate law school requires an energized, dedicated, and highly skilled faculty, staff, and administration who, working together with alumni and friends, recruit the best students, provide them guidance and counseling throughout law school, and prepare them to launch professional careers. We believe this is best accomplished through individualized and customized approaches. We therefore seek ways to develop relationships with students long before they enroll, and continue that relationship long after they have graduated. We also seek to break down traditional silos between different aspects of the school’s operations (e.g., admissions, student affairs, career services, and alumni relations), to create a more network-like structure that will enable us to be more effective at what we do and to deliver an outstanding student experience. We will continue to develop an authentic and relevant vision of student experience at the school that inculcates pride in our institution and an understanding of its history, while encouraging an innovative and take-charge attitude. We have a community of bright minds who are willing to take on tough challenges and our faculty and staff bring energy, commitment, and enthusiasm to our school. We seek to leverage those strengths more effectively. Part of our plan therefore focuses on our operations and our facilities as drivers for success.

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We hold an enormous responsibility both to the faculty and staff who have come before us and to our more than 11,000 alumni. This plan encourages us to be ever responsive in our approach, positioning ourselves to compete with the very best in the world. Our commitment to this plan is collective. We look forward to working with all our stakeholders as we confront the challenges of the future, implement this Strategic Plan, and continue our positive trajectory.


an overview of the plan This plan is divided into THREE SECTIONS: 1. Eight strategies designed to move the Law School forward during the next five years.

These strategies build on the university and Bloomington campus Strategic Plans and

should be read in the context of each.

2. Action steps for each strategy that describe how the school’s faculty and staff

will lead the implementation of the eight strategies.

3. Measures of success that will enable us to determine whether the strategies and

action steps are working.

THE STRATEGIES: REALIZING OUR VISION

A

Bolster Student Engagement and Success

B

Strengthen Our Academic Program

C

Embrace Global Engagement

D

Broaden the Reach of Legal Education

E

Employ Center-Driven Growth

F

Deepen Our Campus Collaborations

G

Build Our Community

H

Diversify and Strengthen Outside Funding

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bolster student engagement and success ACTION STEPS: 3 Integrated and Customized Approaches: We will provide integrated,

customized support that is designed to meet each student’s individual

needs through their life cycle as a student. Part of this approach will

be to enhance our outreach to pre-law advisors and create partner-

ship and mentoring programs. We will strengthen our support of a

broad variety of co-curricular activities and student organizations that

permit students to connect with others who share their interests,

develop leadership skills, and give back to the larger community.

3 Student Recruitment: We are committed to attracting academically

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TOP: PROF. TIM LOVELACE ENGAGES WITH HIS STUDENTS IN HIS COURSE ON RACE, AMERICAN SOCIETY AND THE LAW. BOTTOM: PROF. MARK JANIS TEACHES A VARIETY OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY COURSES AND DIRECTS THE SCHOOL’S CENTER FOR IP RESEARCH.

outstanding, promising students from diverse and underrepresented

backgrounds from throughout Indiana, the nation, and the world.

We will continue to build our pipeline initiative programs to attract a

greater number of students from the very best undergraduate

institutions. We will develop policies and practices to strengthen our

pipeline programs to attract students from Indiana University

Bloomington, the military, and from companies and organizations,

with a particular focus on first-generation undergraduate students,

veterans, student from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, and

students from underrepresented minority groups. For our LLM

program, we will seek to diversify and increase the number of students

with significant prior work experience.

3 Student Financial Support: We currently are ranked among the top


schools in the country for the

amount of scholarship support we provide our students. We will continue to find ways to provide robust

scholarship assistance at a sustainable level for entering students. We will explore different ways to

provide need-based scholarship assistance for students in their second and third years, including use

of the Fromm Fund and the creation of a graduate assistants program with employment on campus.

3 Pervasive Advising and Counseling: We will evaluate our counseling and advising at all levels. This will

include continuing to provide high-level financial aid counseling and programs in financial literacy to

ensure that students live within their means and make wise financial decisions. We will evaluate and

expand the academic counseling provided to our students, and ensure that career counseling occurs at

all stages in a student’s legal education.

3 Academic Support: We will design and pilot an enhanced academic support program for students

beyond our current offerings that will help them assess and adjust their study habits and exam

preparation, and we will examine and assess what support can be provided to students sitting for

challenging bar exams.

3 Collaborative Programming: We will create a program to work more collaboratively with student groups

to tailor academic support programming as appropriate, ensuring we adequately meet the needs

of our diverse student body, with a particular focus on under-represented first-generation students

and students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. We will develop additional programming

to integrate foreign students, both graduate and JD, into our different student groups.

3 Faculty-Student Engagement: We will facilitate student interactions and learning from faculty outside

the classroom through enhanced student involvement in our centers and promotion of other opportu-

nities for collaborative research, building on recent initiatives that involve faculty more actively in the

professional development of students. We will as a faculty set forth clear expectations for their active

engagement with students.

3 Alumni-Student Engagement: Alumni play a critical role for our students as mentors and role models,

and the loyalty and commitment of our alumni are among the Law School’s greatest strengths. We will

create a series of initiatives designed to expand the role and opportunities for alumni to connect and

assist in the professional development of our students. We will aim to create lifelong links with alumni

and the Law School, which are mutually beneficial and bring richness to our student experience.

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3 Career Assistance: We will continue to expand our career programming to provide students with the

support they need to succeed. This will include implementing a holistic professional development

program that begins during new student orientation and continues throughout the curriculum to provide

better career pathways for students. Our Career Services Office will develop customized matchmaking

approaches to career services that closely track our students’ employment efforts, connects our

students with potential employers, establishes more effective pipeline programs, and provides individu-

alized counseling and guidance to each student. We will expand the number and variety of job oppor-

tunities available for our students, including providing counseling to students for employment in law

firms of all sizes in a variety of places, but also employment in business, industry, and government, with

nonprofit organizations, and with accounting, investment, and other professional services firms. We will

explore ways to better support our LLM students with career assistance and expand the number of job

fairs in which our students are able to participate.

3 Post-Graduate Assistance and Support: We seek to support our students not only while in Blooming

ton, but as they begin their professional careers. We will expand our post-graduation bridge-to-

practice program, as well as implement a number of alumni initiatives to provide ongoing professional

support to our recent graduates and to leverage our alumni’s ideas and energy in supporting our

graduates. We will work with the Alumni Board to develop a stronger and geographically diverse

network of alumni that can be mobilized in a number of ways to support our graduates, particularly

those who have just recently launched their careers.

3 Pride Campaign: We will launch a pride campaign to celebrate the special role that the Maurer School

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of Law has played—and continues to play—in our local community and the larger world. The campaign

will include a sophisticated marketing strategy, the revision of our website to highlight our impact

activities for prospective students, and an expansion of the way we use social media to convey the vast

array of activities occurring daily at the Law School. The pride campaign will seek to reconnect alumni

who have lost touch or are no longer actively engaged with the Law School.

3 Technology in Education: We will support these efforts by investing in the necessary technology and

infrastructure, and ensure that information technology is pervasively deployed.

“ We are committed to helping all of our students as individuals flourish not just during their years here in the building, but in their personal and professional lives more broadly.”


MEASURES OF SUCCESS: 3 The quality of our entering students, measured not only by their LSAT and UGPA, but by the depth of

their prior experiences and the quality of the previous academic experiences.

3 The diversity of our entering students, including the number of students from Indiana and the

demographic, ethnic, and socio-economic diversity of our students.

3 Levels of student engagement, as measured by the nationwide Law School Survey of Student

Engagement (LSSSE).

3 The number of contacts our students have with career, school, and financial aid counselors, as tracked

by the Career Services and Student Affairs Offices.

3 Employment rates, with a particular focus on employment in long-term, full-time JD required or JD

advantage positions.

3 Graduating student debt levels, as compared to peer schools, and the amount of scholarship

aid provided.

3 Bar passage rates, particularly for students taking bars outside Indiana. 3 Number of alumni who are involved in activities that support the Law School and its students, including

the number of recently graduated alumni involved in these efforts.

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STUDENTS AND RECENT GRADUATES ENJOY AN INDIANAPOLIS INDIANS GAME, ONE OF MANY ALUMNI ENGAGEMENT EVENTS THE SCHOOL SPONSORS.


strengthen our academic program ACTION STEPS: 3 Excellence in Hiring: We will develop a five-year entry-level and lateral

PROF. CARWINA WENG LEADS THE LAW SCHOOL’S DISABILITY LAW CLINIC.

hiring plan to enhance our intellectually vibrant community of engaged,

influential scholars, who are role models, mentors and highly effective

teachers. Our goal is to develop differential expertise among our

faculty and staff, recognizing the different and important contributions

that individuals with different skill sets make, while at the same time

encouraging institutional citizenship. We will explore the possibility

of cluster hiring to strengthen current areas of expertise, to establish

new strengths, and to pursue high-impact interdisciplinary research.

We will hire faculty willing to contribute to multi-disciplinary and

multi-campus teams to address grand challenges identified by the

university. We will continue to expand the diversity of our faculty,

including hiring faculty from diverse and underrepresented groups.

3 New Programming: We will launch a winter intersession program 16

“ We continue to build our vibrant and inclusive scholarly community as a way to sustain and enrich the intellectual life of our school”

designed to provide an opportunity for students to enroll in one-week

courses before the start of the spring semester that either provide an

introduction to focused lawyering skills or to subjects that are not

suitable for semester-long treatments. We will assess what additional

capstone courses may be added to our curriculum. We will seek to

reduce barriers to our students enrolling in interdisciplinary courses

relevant to legal practice offered by other schools and programs on

the campus, including expanding the number of cross-listed courses

for the benefit of our students.

3 Cataloging and Assessment: We will analyze our existing academic

program to catalogue the deep variety of skills, competencies, and

values already taught in a variety of courses and across the program,

to better convey the depth of instruction we provide, and to assess

gaps and areas for improvement.


3 Learning Outcomes: We will identify the learning outcomes for our overarching academic program and the

measures to assess our students’ progress, including the developing of a curriculum map. We will also

identify new courses and methods of teaching to further our learning outcomes. We will develop additional

advising tools and registration materials that will enable students to more systematically plan the courses

they will take.

3 Experiential Education: We will take stock of the varied experiential education opportunities we offer at the

Law School. This effort will include expanding and deepening our externship program, and ensuring that

we have sufficient skills, simulation, and live-client educational opportunities to enable each student to

meet new ABA requirements and requirements imposed by individual jurisdictions. We will ensure that

our field placements provide our students with rigorous, academic, experiential learning experiences.

We will review and assess the impact we have on the local community through our clinical programs and

the opportunities for students to participate in our clinics.

3 Research and Writing: We will develop our legal research and writing program to include more upper

division experiences.

3 Continued Faculty Growth and Self-Improvement: We will offer professional development opportunities

to our faculty and staff for innovating teaching methods in the classroom and through student co-curricu-

lar activities. We will implement an open classrooms week and develop a series of initiatives designed

to assist faculty in their growth as teachers. We will provide faculty workshops in course design, class-

room learning activities, and assessment, and will provide support for faculty to engage with their

colleagues and assume mentoring roles. We will create a faculty committee that will support and

nominate our faculty for external and university awards and membership in leading organizations (e.g.,

ALI, leadership positions in AALS).

MEASURES OF SUCCESS: 3 The creation of a curriculum map and the identification of learning outcomes and assessment measures. 3 The number of new capstone courses, the opportunities for upper-division writing and research

experiences, and the number of students enrolled in a new winter intersession program.

3 Student satisfaction and engagement and the effectiveness of our teaching methods, measured by

student course and faculty evaluations, peer faculty evaluations, and by LSSSE.

3 The number and quality of simulation, externship, clinical, and live-client offerings. 3 The number and quality of teaching-related professional development workshops and other programs

for faculty.

3 The number and prestige of awards granted to faculty members by internal and external organizations.

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embrace global engagement ACTION STEPS: 3 Develop Global Education: We will continue to increase global

experiences and global cultural competency across the Law School

curriculum. We will cultivate active relationships with partners at law

schools around the world and use evolving technologies to embrace

and develop the potential of these relationships to enhance our

students’ global education. Law School faculty will earn incentives for

working with colleagues from our partner institutions. We will also

seek ways to increase the number of visiting foreign faculty, particu-

larly from countries that provide financial support for faculty visits to

the United States.

3 International Recruiting: We will hold recruiting sessions at gateways

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that will provide opportunities for international students to learn about

Law School programs. We will more heavily market the programs

offered at the Law School to students, staff, and faculty from our

partner institutions, and seek to increase and diversify the number of

countries from which students come to the Law School (and which

our law students visit).

3 Enhance Global Reputation: We will solidify our standing as a first-

“ Global engagement is among our most celebrated strengths and an important differentiator.”

choice, global law school for students seeking any of our degrees,

irrespective of their national origin. We will develop tailored and

customized country reports for targeted countries for LLM recruiting,

written in the language of the home country. Our faculty will work

with our colleagues from our partner institutions to create more joint-

degree initiatives and to hold joint events. We will invest in high-impact,

collaborative research that has a global impact and holds potential

for global recognition, including research designed to support the

university’s Grand Challenges Initiatives.


THE LAW SCHOOL’S STEWART FELLOWS GAIN HANDS-ON WORK EXPERIENCE WHILE LIVING IN OTHER CULTURES .

3 A Gateway Strategy: The Law School will use the IU Gateways to serve as classrooms where

international law students and international lawyers take classes from Indiana Law faculty who appear

in person or by video conference on key issues relevant to their environments. We will use Gateways

as classroom venues to attract non-lawyers with an interest in law to take advantage of our sophisticat-

ed, tailored curriculum.

3 Provide Greater Foreign Experiences: We will expand opportunities for our students to work on mean

ingful transnational legal matters, in the classroom, through our centers, and by way of semester-long

and summertime internships. We will engage in research that is relevant to our foreign partners, espe-

cially with respect to the role law plays in development, nation-building, and commerce.

3 Create Foreign Affiliated Faculty Positions: We will invigorate our global alumni network and encourage

alumni engagement in our teaching and research. We will employ our global networks to ensure that

our broad array of degrees and the relevant transnational work of our centers is well known throughout

the globe. We will leverage our relationships with expert faculty and practitioners around the world.

3 Provide Technological Support: We will support these efforts by investing in necessary technologies to

ensure our interactions with our global partners are fluid, dependent, and abundant.

MEASURES OF SUCCESS: 3 The quality of regular foreign summer externships available to our students and the number of students

obtaining those positions.

3 The amount of scholarship and other funding secured to enable students to take advantage of semester

abroad, summer abroad, and foreign externship opportunities.

3 The number of cross-border teaching collaborations and the number of students enrolled in courses

(including technology-supported cross-border interactions).

3 The number of faculty utilizing available technologies, infrastructure, and relationships to teach students

from foreign schools.

3 The amount of funding secured from internal and external sources for the technological infrastructure

and equipment that will facilitate our global presence.

3 The number of foreign students studying at the Law School

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broaden the reach of legal education ACTION STEPS: 3 Broaden our Classroom Curriculum: We will create new graduate

programs to provide further educational opportunities for lawyers and

to educate non-lawyers about law, through executive education,

masters degrees, advanced graduate education, and certificate

programs. We will seek to strengthen our existing LLM program with

a number of specialized LLM degree options.

3 Strengthen our Areas of Expertise: We will continue to develop the

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depth of our programs, with a range of offerings for lawyers and

non-lawyers in our areas of particular expertise, such as in cyber-

security and information privacy, intellectual property, the global legal

profession, law and society, and constitutional design. We will also

increase our depth in other areas that allow us to build on interdisci-

plinary connections with other schools and programs on campus,

such as criminal justice, environmental law and sustainability, law and

psychology, tax, and business law. We will make strategic investments

to advance areas of disciplinary or interdisciplinary promise that will

allow the Law School to contribute to key areas of current or emerging

research strengths on the Indiana University Bloomington campus.

3 Develop High-Quality, Technology-Enhanced Offerings: We do not

“ A burgeoning need exists for non-lawyers with legal training, and for lawyers to take advantage of advanced legal education.”

intend to become an online law school — the residential campus

experience at Bloomington is special and one of our strengths. Over

the next three to five years, however, we intend to develop a number

of high-quality hybrid and technology-enhanced offerings designed

to provide: (1) legal education for foreign-trained lawyers; (2) instruction

in center-driven specialized subject areas for U.S. lawyers and


non-lawyers in need of

executive education; (3) instruction in subjects in which a flipped classroom experience

would provide opportunities for our students to learn and engage more effectively; and

(4) opportunities for our students to engage more effectively with law students in other

countries as part of our global engagement initiatives.

MEASURES OF SUCCESS: 3 The number of non-lawyer (non-JD) students in executive education, master’s,

advanced graduate education, and certificate programs.

3 The number of foreign students enrolled in our LLM program, including our specialized

LLM degree offerings.

3 The number of campus undergraduate students choosing to participate in our master’s

and certificate programs.

3 The quality of online, technology-enhanced, or hybrid course offerings, and the

effectiveness of those courses as determined by student enrollment, student course

and faculty evaluation, and peer faculty evaluations.

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employ center-driven growth ACTION STEPS: 3 Strategic Planning for Research Centers: Our centers will develop

strategic plans that articulate clear near- and longer-term goals for the

broad range of center activities (e.g., research, instruction, student

engagement, fundraising, marketing, placement, staffing, etc.), and

practical steps for achieving them, consistent with the Law School and

campus Strategic Plans.

3 Fundraising and Financial Support: The Law School and its centers

will work together to develop fundraising and financial support plans

so that the centers can effectively help support themselves with the

staff, facilities, and other resources necessary for them to succeed.

3 Integration and Development: The Law School will better integrate

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“ Through our Centers of Excellence, we address critical challenges facing society, advance our understanding of law and legal institutions, and provide tremendous opportunities for our students to work collaboratively with leading experts.�

centers with all aspects of school life, using the centers as one im-

portant way of helping organize curricular and co-curricular

opportunities for students, faculty, and staff hiring, partnerships with

other schools and partners, collaborative research, fundraising,

marketing, admissions, placement, and other activities.

3 Holistic Development: We will draw more effectively on resources

throughout the university (e.g., faculty and staff in other units, interna-

tional gateways, online education expertise, etc.) to attract new

students (and new types of students), to effectively contribute to

high-impact research and interdisciplinary collaborations on the

Bloomington campus, and to extend the reach of the Law School into

new markets and new job opportunities for students.

3 Exploration of New Areas of Expertise: The Law School will establish a

process to evaluate areas in which the school is well equipped to

address other pressing problems and grand challenges through

enhancing existing curricular offerings or creating new centers or other

programs. Areas ripe for exploration include sustainability, law and

development, and public policy; law and technology; compliance; risk

management; business and tax; and the rule of law. In determining


new areas of growth, the Law School will focus on those key areas of current or emerging interdisciplinary

research strengths on the Indiana University Bloomington campus, where the university seeks to become

a national or international leader.

3 Transparency and Support: We will implement a transparent process for equitably supporting centers

and investing the resources they generate to enhance the activities and sustainability of the centers and

of the Law School.

3 Evaluation: We will establish appropriate criteria for evaluating centers (e.g., with regard to their

productivity, impact, relevance, sustainability, efficiency, unmet needs, etc.) and apply those criteria in

a consistent and transparent manner to enhance the quality of our centers and ensure accountability

to the Law School, partners, supporters, and the communities each center serves.

MEASURES OF SUCCESS: 3 The rankings and reputation of the centers in their respective areas and increased visibility of the

Law School through media coverage.

3 The creation of accessible, practical, strategic five-year plans for each center. 3 Input, in the form of enrollment in center-focused courses, degree programs, and other offerings as

well as outputs in the form of diversified placement of our students.

3 Increased visibility of our centers in the media, policy-making processes, scholarly literature, and the

communities concerned with the important challenges that our centers are addressing.

3 Increased and diversified external financial support for center programs. 3 Productive partnerships with colleagues and other units both within and outside Indiana University.

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deepen our campus and interdisciplinary collaborations ACTION STEPS: 3 Support University Grand Challenges Initiatives: We are an integral part of one of the world’s great,

thriving research universities. We recognize that solving the most challenging and vexing problems our

society faces will require contributions, collaborations, and multidisciplinary knowledge from many

areas of expertise. We will work with our counterparts across campus on high-impact research projects

and encourage our faculty to participate in campus and university research centers and other initiatives

to advance a new generation of interdisciplinary and collaborative efforts that will identify and address

grand challenges.

3 Create Incentives for Interdisciplinary Faculty Collaboration: We will encourage and promote campus

collaborations by investing resources to promote cross-campus endeavors, creating enhanced

opportunities for forming cross-campus partnerships, including those involving Grand Challenges

Initiatives, and recognizing and rewarding collaborative interdisciplinary scholarship and activity.

3 Affiliated and Joint Faculty: We will seek to have a larger number of our faculty obtain affiliate status with 24

other schools and programs on campus, and we will expand the number of faculty that we affiliate

with the Law School. We will explore potential hiring of experienced faculty members with exceptional

records of accomplishment when doing so furthers campus Strategic Plans.


3 Interdisciplinary Research Funding: Faculty members will seek, and the school will create incentives for

professors to seek, internal and external funding for their interdisciplinary research. Relatedly, we will

increase external funding and other support for research and scholarship in various areas of inquiry, and

we will ensure that our research activities are strongly supported both academically and administratively.

3 Joint Degree Programs: We will expand our joint programs and improve their visibility. 3 Campus Programs: We will expand our interaction with other campus units, including by expanding

our scholarship programs, increasing the number of IU Bloomington courses taught by our faculty

in other schools and programs, and providing guest lectures, admission events, and other workshops

to prelaw programs throughout campus.

3 BA/JD (3+3) Programs: We will explore the creation of joint BA/JD programs with other schools

and units on campus, including with the new School of Global and International Studies, the School

of Public and Environmental Affairs, the Wells Scholars Program, and the Hutton Honors Program.

3 Certificate Programs: We will create interdisciplinary certificate programs, both online and residential,

that leverage our unique strengths within the Law School and across campus.

MEASURES OF SUCCESS: 3 The number of faculty who hold affiliated status within other units and the number of collaborating

faculty members who are designated as affiliated within the Law School.

3 The number of students in joint degree programs and in BA/JD (3+3) programs. 3 The amount of funding secured by faculty from internal and external sources, particularly funding

secured to target interdisciplinary and collaborative research.

3 The number of IU Bloomington programs and courses taught by law faculty and the number of

IU Bloomington students who apply to our Law School.

3 The amount and diversity of collaborative, interdisciplinary research and the number of

cross-campus collaborations.

3 The development of certificate programs within the Law School and the number of non-law

IU Bloomington students participating in such programs.

“ We are an integral part of one of the world’s great, thriving research universities, with strengths in a number of fields that deepen an understanding of how law shapes society and how society shapes law.”

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build our community

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ACTION STEPS: 3 Rewarding Excellence: We will foster a culture of high aspiration and performance as well as institutional

commitment and loyalty, through faculty and staff engagement and transparency. As part of this culture

of high aspiration, we will reward excellence and success in a variety of ways and align staff salaries to

reward those making a differential impact. We will motivate our staff to play an integral part in our

aspirations by linking individual objectives to that of the school through a meaningful annual review

process and by recognizing our staff’s accomplishments. As part of this, we will maintain a sustainable

staffing profile to meet our evolving needs. When looking for new staff, we will attract, reward, and retain

the best people, accessing talent from around the nation. We will expand the importance of our annual

staff recognition and service awards.

3 Investment in Professional Development: As with our faculty, we will invest strategically in professional

development to inspire and equip staff and faculty to deploy a range of skills to shape, to influence

and lead, and to serve as role models and innovators. We will look for ways to support professional and

career advancement to help our staff and faculty with administrative responsibilities that provide unpar-

alleled opportunities for helping students succeed. We will develop a more thorough and robust

orientation program for new staff. Student success depends not only on the content of individual

courses and the academic program but also on the creation of a welcoming environment that contrib-

utes to a student’s lifetime engagement with the Law School. Staff can play an integral role with this

ambition, and we seek to provide them the tools to make that happen.

3 Transparency and Engagement: We will foster our ethos of collegiality, inclusiveness, compassion,

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work ethic, and moral strength through effective employee management, engagement and empower-

ment, transparency, and excellent communications. We will hold twice-yearly staff meetings to discuss

the future of the Law School and progress made through strategic planning as a way to enable staff to

invest fully in the strategic ambitions and operational aspects of the school.

3 Integration and Collaboration: Just as collaboration is critical for our faculty’s research and scholarship,

so too is collaboration between our different offices and operations. We will adopt and support

practices and policies to break down traditional silos between different aspects of the school’s opera-

tions (e.g., admissions, student affairs, career services, alumni relations, development, the business

office, and others) to draw on our collective strengths, to be more effective at what we do, and to deliver

an outstanding student experience. Our staff play a critical role in the lives of our students, and we will

seek ways to better integrate our staff as well as our faculty in our students’ professional development.


3 Build a Sense of Pride and Place: We aim for everyone associated with the Law School to have a better

understanding of our strengths, including the accomplishments of our students and alumni, as well as

the impact that our faculty make. We need to convey a deep understanding of what makes the school

special and unique, and the different ways we serve students as well as society.

3 Facilities Enhancement and Refurbishment: We seek to provide a comfortable, welcoming, and stimu

lating working and learning environment to sustain world-class academic activities. We will continue to

evaluate use of existing facilities to ensure that we have the community gathering places students value

and look for, where relationships can be forged and strengthened. We will create a five-year facilities

restoration and refurbishment plan, as well as a fundraising plan for any facilities expansion necessary

to consolidate current operations and to optimize our current space. In our facilities plans, we will

explore the possibility of bringing all resources within one or two buildings. We will continue to seek

ways to use the Jerome Hall Law Library as a gathering place for students to interact, collaborate, and

learn, and to strengthen the library’s historic place in the Law School.

3 Enhance Technology: We will update our facilities with the technology needed to recruit the best and

brightest in a highly competitive marketplace. This will include the creation of a robust technology infra-

structure that will support our teaching and research and permit us more seamlessly to integrate online

and in-class pedagogy in developing a global classroom. We will also seek to leverage advanced

communication and information technology to improve access to learning of all sorts and to foster

innovation in teaching.

MEASURES OF SUCCESS: 3 The quality and number of professional development programs for our staff and faculty. 3 Student satisfaction with our staff, faculty, and the Law School experience as measured by LSSSE. 3 The creation of a five-year facilities restoration and refurbishment plan, and the implementation

of that plan.

“ We embrace a number of initiatives to foster a culture of high aspiration and performance as well as institutional commitment and loyalty.�

29


diversify and strengthen outside funding ACTION STEPS 3 Fine-Tune Development Expertise, Efficiency, and Effectiveness: We

will leverage the expertise, resources, and programming of the Indiana

University Foundation to further develop goals, metrics, and tracking/

reporting systems for managing Law School advancement.

3 Fundraising and Advancement: The Law School will develop the

priorities, structure, and communications strategy for a $60 million

capital campaign as part of the university-wide $2.5 billion bicentennial

campaign, with a launch of the public phase of the campaign in fall

2015. Within these strategies, the school will: (1) develop a more com-

prehensive strategy for planned giving and (2) develop a more

thoughtful and comprehensive approach to securing unrestricted

annual funds.

3 Pipelines for Alumni Engagement and Giving: A key part of developing

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long-term private giving requires building a lifelong commitment to

philanthropy. We will explore and implement new methods of solicita-

tion and communication through the class giving program, and create

a plan for completed pledge follow-up with an emphasis on recent

classes. Principal initiatives will also include developing a new junior

alumni group, and rebranding the Fund for Excellence (annual fund) for

more emphasis on unrestricted giving.

3 Initiative-Driven Approach to Engagement: We will engage our alumni MEMBERS OF THE CLASS OF ‛64 AT THEIR 50TH REUNION.

in the critical operational aspects of the law and continue our

approach to initiative-driven alumni engagement. We will do so by

more fully engaging alumni in the life cycle of the law student, by

emphasizing student recruitment, career development, and lifelong

learning opportunities.


“ The generosity of our alumni keeps a legal education affordable and within reach of deserving students, and enables us to hire and retain extraordinary scholars and researchers, who are at the forefront of their fields�

3 International Fundraising Efforts: We will design and adopt a strategy that will use our global gateway

facilities to help raise resources for the Law School. We will identify overseas alumni who have an

interest or capacity in developing an international fundraising strategy.

3 Grants and External Funding: We will increase grant and other external funding to support research

excellence and will increase individual faculty contributions to furthering the financial sustainability of

their activities and of the institution.

3 Cost Containment, Effectiveness, and Efficiency: We remain one of the most affordable highly ranked

schools in the nation and have kept costs low while retaining excellence in value. We will continue to

align resources with our strategic priorities by more actively monitoring our finances through new

tracking systems and expressly appraising the short- and long-term financial implications of all major

decisions. We will reduce unnecessary overhead and expenses as a portion of overall budget. We will

regularly update our short- and long-term financial forecasts, including reviewing more closely at a

departmental level annual budgets to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

3 Certificate and New Degree Programs: We will leverage the reputation of our research centers to

generate new revenue that will come from, among other places, a series of certificate and innovative

degree programs that offer opportunities, in particular, to interested students located in key emerging

markets where IU seeks to have a sustained presence.

MEASURES OF SUCCESS: 3 The creation of new advancement metrics for the bicentennial campaign, and meeting or exceeding

those metrics.

3 Fundraising levels as measured by the annual fund and total annual donor giving. 3 Participation rates of alumni, including participation rates and financial contributions from overseas

alums, individual class giving, and the Board of Visitors and Alumni Board.

3 Number of alumni, including particularly recently graduated alumni, who are engaged with the

Law School (through mentoring, participating in programs, helping with career placement, etc.)

3 Donor retention rates and the number of new donors. 3 Amount of revenue resulting from the implementation of center-based, new certificate and

degree programs.

3 Expense per students and cost of attendance less gift aid.

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THE PLANNING PROCESS This Strategic Plan covers the period from 2015 to 2020. Its preparation has involved extensive analysis both of the risks and challenges we will face over this period as well as the assets we can leverage and the resources we can deploy to build an even stronger and more distinctive Law School. The plan represents the collective efforts of faculty, staff, alumni, and students. Its roots can be found in the school’s search for a new dean, when stakeholders came together to discuss the school’s direction as part of the decanal search process. The formal strategic planning process began in spring 2014, with a number of meetings focused on providing faculty with information on fundraising goals, student recruitment, and graduate job placement, as well as on the changing legal profession. Presentations to both the Board of Visitors and the Alumni Board provided detailed information about the school. In summer 2014, a faculty Strategic Planning Committee was formed to spearhead the heavy lifting and coordination of the planning process. The fall of 2014 was focused on data collection and information gathering. The Committee met every other 32

week to discuss the process and assess feedback. Discussions were had in open forums with faculty, staff, students, and alumni. Input about the school’s future direction was solicited at day-long meetings of both the Alumni Board and the Board of Visitors. Strategic planning was also discussed with the Dean’s Student Advisory Council, at a Town Hall, and at a student open forum. In December, the school invited more than 400 alumni to provide suggestions and comments on the school’s future direction. A December staff meeting was devoted to discussing the challenges and opportunities for the school, and in January a full-day faculty retreat was committed to discuss our future. The spring of 2015 was dedicated to writing and soliciting feedback on plan drafts. The Committee began circulating initial drafts of the plan in late January. Again the stakeholders — faculty, staff, students, and alumni — were asked to provide feedback and input. The Alumni Board reviewed a draft in March and drafts were circulated to the Board of Visitors. Faculty, senior staff, and students were also sent drafts. A final draft was circulated to faculty, the Alumni Board, and the Board of Visitors in late April. The faculty voted to approve the plan in May 2015.


FACULTY STRATEGIC PLANNING COMMITTEE Hannah Buxbaum Fred Cate Linda Fariss Joseph Hoffmann Jayanth Krishnan Ajay Mehrotra Donna Nagy Christiana Ochoa Austen Parrish Victor Quintanilla Cynthia Reichard Jeffrey Stake Carwina Weng Deborah Widiss

BOARD OF VISITORS

LAW SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Austen L. Parrish, Dean and James H. Rudy

Kathleen St. Louis, Chair Professor of Law Stephen Paul, Vice Chair

Donna Nagy, Executive Associate Dean and

C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law LAW ALUMNI BOARD

Ajay Mehrotra, Associate Dean

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Scott Bassett, President

ASSISTANT DEANS

Courtney Tobin, President-Elect

Lesley Davis

Jeanne Picht, Vice President

Andrea Havill

Lisa Powell, Secretary

Catherine Matthews

Susan Lynch, Treasurer

Frank Motley

Andrew Buroker, Past President

Kenny Tatum

Ken Turchi

DEAN’S STUDENT ADVISORY COUNCIL Weixi Chen Andrea Douglas Zachary Shapiro, SBA President Pablo D. Puente Jeffrey Haut

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