A Big Success

• Publication year: 2021
• Author: Diane Wasznicky

A Big Success

Diane Wasznicky

Diane E. Wasznicky is a partner at Bartholomew & Wasznicky LLP in Sacramento, CA. She is co-founder and facilitator of the Sacramento Custody Discussion Group (1983 - 2008) and has served on the Senate Task Force on Family Relations Courts. She is active in a number of organizations, including serving as President of the Sacramento County Bar Association, President of Women Lawyers of Sacramento, President of the Association of Family Conciliation Courts (AFCC-CA), and President of the Association of Certified Family Law Specialists (ACFLS). She has served as an advisor to FlexCom since 2004. She also chairs the Legislation Committee of AFCC and currently serves as Treasurer of AFCC. She currently serves as a Coordinating Director for ACFLS.

Three and a half years ago a small number of family law attorneys and mental health professionals formed a group to try and recruit and train mental health professionals (MHPs) to join the family law community. The need was and is dire to replace and supplement the existing family law MHPs who serve as Private CCRCs and evaluators. Our group was named the Mediator Outreach Group, better known as MOG.

A great deal of time and effort were devoted by MOG to find and recruit interested mid-career MHPs. I have written prior articles about how we did this successfully in the Sacramento area, urging family law professionals to replicate these efforts in their communities. Very few counties have even considered taking on that challenge. Perhaps MOG's success will make them rethink that choice.

In past articles, I have outlined our task and our discovery that adequate training for this work was unavailable and had to be created/developed from the ground up. In 2019 MOG presented two forty-hour trainings, one on Custody Evaluations and another on Custody Mediation. We developed these to meet the requirements of statutory law and the California Rules of Court. We also recruited top notch presenters for each training. Both trainings were co-sponsored and...