Welcome to the summer edition of the Family Justice Initiative newsletter. We hope you will find these resources helpful to your practice.
Evaluating the Impact of Legal Representation Programs on Outcomes for Parents and Children
by Cathy Krebs and Kathleen Creamer
As enthusiasm grows for ensuring every parent and every child receives high-quality legal representation, there is greater interest in evaluating programs that provide that representation. Emerging research tells us that high-quality legal representation is one of the best interventions available in child welfare to shorten foster care stays and strengthen kinship practice. A growing focus on procedural justice also tells us that families report higher satisfaction and engagement with the court process when they feel they are treated fairly and have meaningful access to the court to tell their sides of the story.
Evaluating legal representation provides several benefits including the ability to improve and strengthen existing and proposed programs and representation models, as well as ensuring funding for these programs. It also comes with challenges, like how to define a “good outcome” and how to show that the outcome is causally related to the availability of high-quality representation. There is also some debate about whether and how child-welfare defined outcomes should drive our practice, when a onstitutional right to family is at stake and the relational support that a client gets from a strong attorney-client bond is nearly impossible to measure.
The good news is that resources are available on how to evaluate legal representation of children and parents.
FJI evaluation resources
- Introduction to Evaluating the Impact of Legal Representation Programs on Outcomes for Parents and Children by Mark E. Courtney, PhD, Samuel Deutsch Professor, The University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration. This brief provides a great overview on issues like causation, how to design an evaluation that establishes a causal relationship between legal representation and outcome and random assignments.
- The FJI data template is derived from the FJI Attributes of High-Quality Legal Representation and was developed for FJI’s demonstration sites to assess their jurisdiction’s performance on the attributes of high-quality legal representation. The FJI data collection tool FAQ is a companion piece that answers common questions related to measuring the attributes in the data template.
- FJI overview of existing research on the legal representation of children and/or parents includes an FJI Demonstration Site Report, Improving the Lives of Children and Families Through High-Quality Lawyering, from Dependency Legal Services (Marin and Solano Counties), East Bay Children’s Law Offices (Alameda County), and East Bay Family Defenders (Alameda County).
Other helpful evaluation tools
- Measuring Child Welfare Court Performance: Review of Resources from the Capacity Building Center for Courts. This report summarizes information about the “types and range of measures developed to assess court, judicial, and attorney performance in child welfare cases and used to study child welfare court processes and judicial and attorney practices’ impact on child welfare case outcomes.”
- The National Quality Improvement Center on the Representation of Children in the Child Welfare System (QIC-Child Rep) conducted a needs assessment that identified substantial consensus on the role and duties of the child’s lawyer, the development of a best practice model, and an empirically-based analysis of how legal representation for the child might be best delivered. Results, information and training materials from the QIC-child rep were published in the book Children’s Justice and are maintained at www.ImproveChildRep.org (now maintained by the National Association of Counsel for Children). How to Improve Legal Representation of Children in America’s Child Welfare System provides a 22-page summary of the research and recommendations. A two-page overview can be found at: Federal leadership should ensure that all court-involved children are represented by an attorney in child protection proceedings
- The Judicial Decision-Making and Hearing Quality Project published the Compendium of Measures and Data Sources, which describes measures and data sources used to study judicial decision-making and hearing quality in child welfare cases. Geared toward researchers and court practitioners alike, the Compendium aims to inform measurement decisions for research, evaluation, practice improvement, and policy. A-two page overview of the Compendium, How Legal Professionals Can Use the Compendium of Measures and Data Sources, is also available.
Evaluating the impact of legal representation for parents and children, while challenging, will be much easier with the tools now available. Please let us know if you have any questions about any of these resources.