Ensuring a Place for Family Court Services in the Family Court of the Future: Do or Die

• Published date: 01 October 2014
• Author: Linda Fieldstone
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12112
• Date: 01 October 2014

PERSPECTIVES

ENSURING A PLACE FOR FAMILY COURT SERVICES IN THE FAMILY

COURT OF THE FUTURE: DO OR DIE

Linda Fieldstone

In order for family court services to thrive amidst the next wave of budget cuts, court and legislative deliberations regarding

essential services, and ongoing barriers to services experienced by litigants, units must make themselves relevant to parties, the

court, and the family law community.Learning from Family Court Services of Miami-Dade County, Florida, it is essential that

units develop collaborative relationships both within the court and the community. Various innovations and protocols are

offered in order to ensure family court services a place in the family court of the future.

Key Points for the Family Court Community:

• Readers will be able to justify the need for a family court services unit in their judicial system.

• Readers will be able to identify barriers and restrictions currently placed on family court services programs.

• Readers will be able to detail components of family court services that will keep the unit relevant by making the unit

indispensable to the parties, the court, and the family law community.

• Readers will be able to identify strategies for family court services to do more with less and stay afloat evenwhen there

are budget cuts and threats of elimination.

• Readers will have a case example in the FamilyCour t Services unit in Miami-Dade County, Florida, to refer to when

proposing the creation, development, or modification of a unit in their family court.

Keywords: Budget Cuts;Co-Parenting;Court Programs;Family Court;Family Court Services;Family Court Triage;Self-

Represented Litigants;and Timesharing.

At first, the future of the family court from the court services perspective may appear grim. No one

knows more about living on the edge with budget implications than those that work day in, day out,

in court services units. Most court services staff are at-will employees, who can be cut at any time with

no recourse. And with funding sources limited, court services must do more and more, for less.

Although not all built the same, because our courts, court cultures, and communities are not all the

same, we respond to the needs of those around us, providing brief focused evaluations, parent

education, social investigations, mediation, parenting coordination, supervised visitation, early family

court triage, custody and parenting plan evaluations, problem-solving services, high-conflict inter-

ventions, and crisis assistance. We are the center for those self-represented, lower-income, and

multi-need parents who are faced with many barriers to services; we are their access to justice and a

greater chance to leave the court better off than they entered it.

After funding cuts demolished other court services units in Florida in 2005, Miami-Dade County,

the fourth largest circuit in the United States, has the only Family Court Services (FCS) unit still left

in the state. Scrambling to stay afloat, we recognize that our future is dependent on making our FCS

unit essential to our court system. The Florida Supreme Court Committee on Children and Families

in the Court proscribed guiding principles in 20001, including a Unified Family Court where thera-

peutic justice (a naughty reference to some, especially legislators) should be integral to the family law

process and responsive to the family’s interrelated legal and nonlegal issues to produce a result that

Correspondence: LFieldstone@jud11.flcourts.org

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 52 No. 4, October 2014 627–631

© 2014 Association of Familyand Conciliation Cour ts