Good on you, Alan

I used to work for Alan Abramowitz. I like Alan; he's a good guy.

Here's a quote from him in the South Florida Times:

“I think whenever you can keep a family together, it’s a victory,” said Alan Abramowitz, Miami’s regional administrator for the Department of Children and Families, and a proud family preservationist.

File this under "credit where it's due" posts. More:

“[DCF] Secretary Butterworth believes in family preservation, and believes that the state cannot make a good parent,” Abramowitz said, acknowledging that DCF’s top brass has not always been so pro-family. “There are so many families that could have been kept together that we have failed.’’

He recognizes that some families are incapable of providing a safe place for their children without state intervention.

“We will still have to remove some children from families, unfortunately. But it’s not as many as we do,” he said.
[snip]
Abramowitz, 46, balks at the system’s tendency to paint the parents it encounters as monsters who do not care for their children.

“The majority of the time, they love their children,” he said.

He is also mindful that many children enter the system due to poverty-related issues that the system classifies as “neglect,” noting that, “We should see it as a poverty issue and not an abuse or neglect issue.”

And finally, I am very glad that Alan is aware of the study mentioned in the article

For Abramowitz, walking the walk has meant impressing upon his investigators the trauma that removal inflicts upon children.

“The studies have come out over the past few years to show we have actually been doing a disservice to families,” Abramowitz said.

One such study, the March 2007 Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Foster Care, looked at outcomes of more than 15,000 children and concluded that,
“Those placed in foster care are far more likely than other children to commit crimes, drop out of school, join welfare, experience substance abuse problems, or enter the homeless population.”

Buggy Whips

As part of a comment to a few post again, we read the following:

Other attorneys should really take a look at themselves and evaluate whether they are trying to bring an agency down because their own business is suffering.

Everything benefits from context. That comment was in the context of a poster defending against other comments about the performance of the 4th RC office. That's all well and good.

The receiving end has a context as well. That is, we private attorneys have been reading quotes from Florida politicians for over a year, and particularly during the FACDL quo warranto action, that, to get right down to it, imply that we private dependency attorneys are selfish luddites, saboteurs of innovation and tax savings for the people of Florida, just so we can get rich, Rich, RICH, off of court appointments.

Well, it has been easy to infer those things over the past year, and even before that, attending our local Indigent Services Committee meetings.

So, a year and a half after our ISC cut our rate from a low hourly one to a rather astonishingly low flat fee that drove 83% of our experienced attorneys off the local rotation list for dependency; one year after the RCs were established by law and I'd hope to make a go at consulting and helping the RCs get set up; 8 months after the RCs were supposed to begin taking cases, and 6 months after the RCs actually did begin taking cases; and finally, after the legislature cut our flat fee 20%, I have some thoughts.

Thought # 1: It's over. I have a pretty website called DependenyDefense.com, and I no longer intend to be a dependency defense attorney.

Thought #2: Buggy whip makers went out of business with the advent of the automobile (and then the polar bears drowned!) (Just kidding. Was that sarcasm or a heartfelt warning? I won't tell. I try to keep most politics out of this blog). So why can't private defense attorneys who used to make a living accepting court appointments quietly and graciously go out of business?

My answer to that question is that we already are out of business; we just haven't put the lock on the front door just yet. The 20% fee reduction, along with JAC's very creative methods of finding audit deficiencies that destroy any possibility of keeping a small firm's cash flow predictable, is, I fear the end of anyone truly specializing in private defense work.

The first reason for that is that people with money don't get into dependency court, poor people do. Therefore, for a private attorney to specialize enough to get really good at what he or she does, he or she must be somehow subsidized. So all along, we buggy whip makers were paid by the taxpayer for performing a public service.

The second reason for that is, while buggy whip makers went out of business or adapted to making automobile accessories, the substitution of the OCCCRCs for private attorneys is not the same. The RCs won't be producing automobiles, to stick to my analogy, they will still be providing the buggy whips. Same product, and the same funding source. What is different is that the RCs can't meet all of the demand, so we private buggy whip makers are asked to to keep our entire factory open to produce much less, and at a smaller subsidy per unit of product. Nobody can do that for very long.

That leaves diversifying. In my personal case, I have a contract for other services at the juvenile courthouse (AAL for children in residential treatment centers and with other needs for representation)that helps to cushion the fall from buggy whip making bliss, but that has two problems. One, it keeps me tied to the juvenile courthouse, where virtually all potential clients are indigent, and two, that I just had to renegotiate the contract and ended up agreeing to increase my caseload by 28% or take a 28% cut in the compensation. That's not a complaint; it is a blessing compared to those at the juvenile courthouse who don't have such an alternative source of income. Still, I can see the end. One rotation day a month in which I might receive one or two clients at the most, for $800 a case is untenable.

So diversify we shall. We've entered the age of government monopoly on buggy whip making. Since now everyone a parent will come in contact with during the course of a dependency case will be a government agent, let's hope they at least meet the promise of saving a whole lot of taxpayer money in the process. The age of private attorneys able to specialize in and devote all of their time to defending indigent clients in dependency court as a check on government agents is over.

I still have hopes that in the future the legislature will allow experimentation with bidded contracts.

Some website changes

Howdy, and happy weekend. I've updated the DepDef website a bit. It used to be written with a future view, e.g., "changes are coming" to the manner in which indigent parents in dependency cases will get counsel, and "how we can all work together" and that sort of thing.

I am very, very sorry to say that the working together thing never got off the ground. It never got onto its tiptoes, even. For those who've read me mentioning it before, I'm sorry for the repetition, but I've been disappointed to have my offers to help the new RCs be ignored for the past year. And any reading of the comments to a couple of posts ago will show you that there is a lot of Us vs. Them-ism going on.

Since the situation is somewhat different, I've made minor changes to language on the website. I just thought I'd let you know. I've also gotten rid of the attorney directory entirely, in favor of a link to this blog. Thank you very much to all who got listed, and the even more who asked to be listed. It was simply too difficult to keep it updated properly and I don't imagine that it was driving a whole lot of paying business to anyone anyway.

I will revisit the directory in the future if the message board or some other form of dependency defender community gels and gets more active.

last five searches, revisited

Just to emphasize the post below, here are the last five search engine entries that lead readers to this blog, as opposed to any actual useful information about the RCs:

1. AOL search for words "Jeffrey Deen", this blog is search result #3

2. Google search for words "Jeffrey Deen, of the Fifth DCA regional", this blog is search result #3.

3. Google search for words "dependency defense". #1 result.

4. Google search for words "child abuse cases defense florida jackson flyte", this blog is #1 search result.

5. Google search for words "regional counsel jackson", this blog is #6 search result.

I'll let this theme go now. I hope I've made a point. For as long as the RCs, who I quite frankly would have been hired specifically for their abilities to innovate and make the most of technology, don't bother to establish an internet presence, their clients (and judges and opposing counsel and GALs, etc) will end up getting their information about them....here.

Or I suppose searchers can just ask me about them

I've written and commented about it before, but I just can't help but keep scratching my head.

How is it even possible that a brand new agency that just came into existence in 2007, and which has now had a year to get some basic infrastructure built, still has no internet presence at all?

I'm speaking of the RCs, or the OCCRCs, or whatever you want to call them. Try the search engine of your choice to try to find out something about your new lawyer and her office if you are a parent in a dependency case. Most of the time, you will only find this blog.

Here are the last four searches that brought readers to this blog:

1: philip massa attorney florida -- google result #7, higher results reprintings FACDL opinion in Supreme Court.

2: 19th circuit regional conflict counsel -- google result #5, higher results from stale news article and state budget items.

3: phillip j. massa defense attorney florida -- google result #1.

4: dependency lawyer in ocala -- google results #4 and 6.

It's like this every day. I get people coming here looking for information on Jeff Deen, or Jackson Flyte, or the others, and this absurdly simple and unimportant blog is the information people find on the web. I used to think that fact would make some of them more friendly with the idea of exchanging information, but I was wrong about that.

But why are internet searchers finding this site and not information directly from the RCs? Because the RCs have exactly zero web presence of their own.

Come on already. Your clients are poor, but they use the internet too.

New JAC contract is up

It's mean; it's onerous; it's insulting.

But it is available if you intend to keep on taking dependency appointments after July 1, that is, after five days from now.

So here it is. Is anyone going to re-up?


By the way, I note, (if I am reading the appropriations bill correctly), the budget for fiscal year 2008 for court-appointed counsel in civil and dependency cases is $5.5 million statewide. I wonder how much of that will be eaten up by 2007 billings that just don't happen to be paid yet as of June 30th. I alone have a half-dozen audit deficiency responses for which I've been waiting for JAC to make a decision for over eight months.

Meanwhile, back in Kansas

The head of the state's child welfare agency was recorded in a meeting with a family advocacy group saying that Sedgwick County prosecutors have "bullied" social workers into putting information they don't agree with in affidavits. Those affidavits are used to decide whether children remain in protective custody or are returned to their parents..

That's just crazy talk. If someone claims to be acting in a child's interest and happens to be a government employee, they are immune from normal human foibles and pressures, no?

Turn and face the strain (ch-ch-changes)

Thanks to a C_LS attorney for alerting me to the changes to Chapter 39 set to take effect July 1, 2008. Here is a link to the revisions so you can read for yourself.

Allow me to highlight a few of the more interesting ones:

39.01(1); The definition of abandonment is changed. I note that a parent must now maintain (I quote) a "positive" relationship with a child to avoid being guilty of abandonment. One supposes that it is not the parent and child who will be deciding if their relationship is "positive".

39.01(14) adds a new definition, that of "child who has exhibited inappropriate sexual behavior" while not defining what is inappropriate except to say that it is a child under age 12 who is found by either the court or DCF to have committed an inappropriate sexual act. That seems rather broad and subjective to me, and snags everything from typical victim behavior to self-exploration to innocent mimicry of something a child has seen (all depending on the subjective personal standards of the DCF worker) and places it all under the same heading with budding predators. Until someone can explain to me why this change was necessary, it worries me. Section 39.201 also seems to require such children to be treated as offenders and automatically referred to law enforcement.

39.301(39)(g) adds to the definition of harm any baby who is born with any amount of alcohol or metabolite of a controlled substance in his or her body, and deletes the previous requirement of a showing that the child was adversely affected. Wow. This is also added as a ground for TPR (39.8055(1)(k))if the mother had any other child adjudicated as drug exposed. I'll leave it to others for now to explain why this is probably a step in the wrong direction.

39.301(16)(a); Mildly interesting. The Department no longer has to conclude an investigation within 60 days if there is a related and ongoing criminal investigation.

39.504(1); Very interesting, mostly for what is deleted in this section. DCF no longer must file a petition, that is, actually open a judicial dependency case, in order to file for an injunction to "prevent any act of child abuse". We are all familiar with injunctions issued under Chapter 39, but in the past those were within the context of an ongoing judicial case in which parents are provided attorneys.

No more. Now, so long as DCF is conducting an investigation, which may now continue for an indefinite period of time under certain conditions, DCF is relieved of its responsibility to attempt family preservation and/or provide services and to file a petition to which the parents could respond and be provided legal counsel. I hope I'm not making too much of it, but read the revision and tell me what you think. DCF now has a new way to respond to a report: file for an injunction (which might never expire -- this is a change from when it used to end at disposition, that is, after a normal adjudication of the case) and walk away from the situation.

Another step in the wrong direction. By the way, the standard for the injunction is not probable cause, but "reasonable cause". Very broad, that. It seems to me that any anonymous hotline call in and of itself could be treated as "reasonable cause" if it alleges the correct things. Ask for an injunction, get an order disallowing any and all contact between a parent and child, and voila, case closed, DCF's work is done. No appointed lawyers, no services, no fuss, no muss.

The C_LS attorney who tipped me to this change says he doesn't intend to use that provision. I believe him, until and unless his superiors make him. Unfortunately, he's not the only C_LS attorney in the state.

39.507(7)(a); From now on there will be only one adjudication of dependency. There won't be separate trials for different parents. You need to be aware of this, because if you have a non-offending parent, particularly one who is only brought into the case post-dispo, you need to avail yourself of your evidentiary hearing required by the new 39.507(7)(b).

And finally, of the most interesting and dramatic changes:

39.806(1)(e)(1): Our clients now have 9 months to complete a case plan, not 12. This 25% reduction in their ability to achieve reunification coincides neatly with the reduction of their attorney's compensation by 20%, doesn't it?

Legislatively speaking, this has not been a good year for family preservation.

I should never have doubted you

Readers have been tipping me to the fact that the legislature has cut the flat fee for dependency cases by 20% for several weeks now, but I was never able to find it in writing. Why, because reading the appropriations bill conference report is like....well, think of something boring and frustrating at the same time...like trying to participate in a permanency staffing, or kissing someone you don't even like who is much shorter than you are.

Anyway, it's there, and it's true. Our flat fee of $1,000 for the first year of a dependency case is going down to $800 in just over three weeks.

I'm not going to rant here about the legislature's shortsightedness, lack of understanding of opportunity cost, or inability to grasp the true cost, fiscal and otherwise, of having any child in foster care who might not have been with a skilled and prepared defense of her parents.

I will wonder both aloud and internally how much longer I will stay in dependency defense, and wonder how long you will.