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NJSBA seeks standards, Court Rule for parenting coordinators

By NJSBA Staff posted 08-13-2021 09:14 AM

  

In her role as a parenting coordinator, Amy Wechsler has helped divorced parents agree on everything from which parking lot they would use as a drop-off point for their child for weekend parenting time to the therapist the child would see—important, but not necessarily the kind of matters requiring judicial review.

Parenting coordinators are used mainly by high-conflict couples who have difficulty reaching agreements about the mostly day-to-day care and raising of the children in the context of an existing parenting plan.

But Wechsler, like many legal professionals, says New Jersey’s lack of clarity on what parenting coordinators are, how they are trained and the processes they and the courts should follow is problematic, and has caused confusion among judges, attorneys and litigants.

“When something is ill defined, people’s expectations are everywhere and rarely met,” said Wechsler, a member of the New Jersey State Bar Association (NJSBA) Family Law Section and chair of the NJSBA Task Force on Parenting Coordination.

But the NJSBA has a plan to change that. The Association submitted an extensive report, with a proposed Court Rule on the appointment of parenting coordinators and the parenting coordination process, to the Judiciary for consideration.

The report and Court Rule are the culmination of more than two years of research and review by the NJSBA Task Force on Parenting Coordination, a multi-disciplinary team of family law attorneys, psychologists and social workers. The group examined similar programs in other states and responded to questions and concerns about a defunct pilot program on parenting coordinators. The NJSBA Family Law Section shepherded the project, which was adopted by the Board of Trustees this summer.

“The New Jersey State Bar Association requests the Judiciary consider adoption of the proposed Court Rule to assist litigants, their attorneys, and the Courts in resolving continuing contentious issues in appropriate family law matters for the benefit of all parties and, in particular, the children who are often caught in the middle,” NJSBA President Domenick Carmagnola wrote in a letter to the Judiciary.

The NJSBA report and Court Rule define the role of parenting coordinators, what their authority is, how they are appointed and what they are expected to accomplish. A sample order for appointing a parenting coordinator is included in the report.

Clarity and guidance on parent coordination are sorely needed, Wechsler said. The process is so haphazard, she said, that some individuals who have been named as parenting coordinators in marital settlement agreements have received an order months or years later, only to discover they’d been appointed as a parenting coordinator.

Task force member Phyllis Klein, a matrimonial attorney at Donahue Hagan Klein and Weisberg in Morristown, said, “There should be flexibility in any rule, but to have no rule is a problem. We want to function with rules.”

Although the Judiciary terminated the state’s pilot program on parenting coordinators in 2012, judges can continue to appoint parenting coordinators, but many appointments do not define the individual’s role or qualifications, or specify limits of their authority, the NJSBA report found.

“There really are no guardrails on what a parenting coordinator can do, other than what the court order is, which could say very little or a lot,” said Christine Fitzgerald, a member of the task force and a matrimonial attorney at Seiden Family Law in Cranford.

The NJSBA’s proposed seven-part rule outlines the definition and goal of a parenting coordinator, parenting coordination guidelines, qualifications of parenting coordinators, procedures, conflicts of interest and impartiality, confidentiality and manners of communications, a mechanism for a statewide approved list of parenting coordinators, and addresses immunity.

The rule generally provides a tool for judges to appoint a neutral mental health or legal professional with family mediation training and experience “to assist parents who are unable to resolve disputes that arise regarding the health, education, general welfare, and process of raising their children.”

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