ONE LAWYER SPEAKS OUT ABOUT THE TYRANNY
 of the COURTS IN CUSTODY BATTLES

Parents At The Mercy Of For-Profit Overlords

By NORM PATTIS

Subtly, bit by bit and without notice, our courts are creating new legal doctrine in which parents are required to meet set standards of behavior or they forfeit the right to see their children.  In short, we are creating licensure requirements for parents. Is this something we intend to do?

Family court is largely lawless, and the courts seem unable or unwilling to do much about it.  Recent stories in the Tribune have reported what amounts to what looks like fraud among some of the family bar:  Routinely counseling clients to be less than candid about financial affidavits, for example.  The reports do not indicate whether there have been referrals to grievance committees for lack of candor toward the tribunal.  Perhaps that is because practicing with one's finger's crossed is de rigeur in the some sectors of the bar.

But let's not forget another legal doctrine common to the family courts.  It is a new real estate doctrine:  Possession by 911. That's where a divorcing spouse makes repetitive complaints to the police over trifling and sometimes fabricated issues. These are then leveraged into family court orders keeping one party or another from entering the family home.  I am aware of several cases where clients, usually women, were counseled that calls to the police were a good way to get their spouse removed from the home.

But the coup de grace is the family supervision industry. There are big bucks and endless work in monitoring parents.  And no one regulates this industry.

It works something like this: Parents with children file for divorce.  There is friction incident to the divorce.  But the children must live somewhere.  They go to one parent, and the other is given visitation.  But the visiting parent must agree to supervision, and that requires a team consisting of social workers, psychologists and visitation supervisors.  Each must be paid hourly.  Some lawyers in the state apparently have set up such visitation centers, perhaps referring their own clients for services.

These essentially private entities are unregulated by the state and operate according to their own standards.  Thus, a supervision center is free to impose upon a client a service agreement.  Breach of that service agreement can be grounds for suspending visitation.

The party iced out of his or her children's lives by this self-appointed therapeutic elite can appeal to the courts for relief. But that's costly, and places the court in the untenable position of sorting through conflicting claims about often boorish behavior.

If we are going to have family courts, we ought also to have the infrastructure to support them. That may well require an increase in court-supervised family services.  But it would also focus providers of these services on what is truly necessary as court employees struggle to make use of limited resources.

Turning to for-profit private supervisors transforms the parent-child relationship into something akin to a commodity.  An unregulated industry erects idiosyncratic standards of what is and is not good parenting. These standards too often become standards of perfection. Parents aggrieved by the acts and omissions of this new class of for-profit regulators have few avenues to turn to for relief.

The legislature ought to commission a study of the use of for-profit regulators of visitation. It ought also to examine the propriety of lawyers owning and investing in such entities.

We shed blood, sweat and tears over what is in the best interest of the children.  Why are we so willing to turn over decisions about this to an industry without any discernible standards? •

Norm Pattis is a criminal defense lawyer and civil rights lawyer in Bethany.