The Challenges of Family Court Service Reform

• Author: Peter Salem
• Published date: 01 October 2014
• Date: 01 October 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12119

THE CHALLENGES OF FAMILY COURT SERVICE REFORM

Peter Salem

Reforming family courts and court services remains a continuing and pervasive challenge, as described in the White Paper

developed bythe Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System’s Honoring FamiliesInitiative. This commentary

explores challenges to reforming court services and concludes that significant funding is needed to achieve long-term, effective,

and overarching change. The commentary also examines the proposition of community–court partnerships and suggests that

(1) each community must tailor its program based on its needs and resources and (2) specific operational elements of a court

services program, rather than its location, lead to effective service delivery.

Key Points for the Family Court Community:

• Sufficient funding of family court services is critical to effective service delivery.

• Although insufficient funding may not eliminate services, it may change the fundamental nature of the dispute

resolution process.

• Services should be tailored based on the needs and resources of the community.

Keywords: Court Reform;Family Court Resources;and Family Court Services.

Upon reading the White Paper of the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal

System’s Honoring Families Initiative on the court and separating and divorcing families (Kourlis,

Taylor, Schepard, & Pruett, 2013),I was alternately depressed and gratified. I became disheartened as

the authors identified a litany of concerns for parents and children who are users of family courts and

family court service (FCS) agencies, for multidisciplinary professionals who work in the field, for the

broader justice system and for society at large. These include: an increase in separation and divorce;

an influx of cases; an increasing number of self-represented litigants; substantive law creating more

discretion and contention; economic, behavioral, emotional, and educational risks to children asso-

ciated with separation and divorce; the impact of continuing conflict between separated parents; and

the financial costs to both parents and business productivity of separation and divorce.

My spirits were then lifted as the White Paper identified several “problem-solving-promoting

processes” designed to address the above concerns and that have achieved some level of success. It is

particularly gratifying for me, as executive director of the Association of Family and Conciliation

Courts (AFCC), that the development of these processes are generally traceable to agencies and

colleagues who have been AFCC stalwarts and leaders over the last half-century. For instance, child

custody mediation, which evolved from conciliation counseling (Folberg, 1974) and began in FCS

agencies in California, Wisconsin, and Minnesota (Ricci, 2004), was first piloted in 1973 in the same

Los Angeles Conciliation Court that founded AFCC 10 years earlier (Thoennes, Salem, & Pearson,

1995). Divorce education programs, which began in Kansas in the late 1970s and early 1980s, spread

rapidly throughout North America in the 1980s and 1990s, with AFCC and its members serving as

catalysts for program development, dissemination, and institutionalization (Salem, Sandler, &

Wolchick, 2013). Earlyneutral evaluation for parenting disputes was developed by AFCC members at

Hennepin County (Minneapolis, MN) FCS (Pearson et al., 2006), then introduced in Colorado at a

training conducted by our Minnesota colleagues for the AFCC Colorado Chapter. Finally, an AFCC

consulting team collaborated with AFCC members in the Connecticut Court Support Serviced

Division to design, implement, and evaluate a differentiatedcase management system that helped spur

Correspondence: psalem@afccnet.org

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 52 No. 4, October 2014 670–677

© 2014 Association of Familyand Conciliation Cour ts