By Jeremy Loudenback, The Imprint, October 27, 2021
A start-up law firm in Northern California with a progressive approach to representing parents who’ve lost their kids to foster care is scrambling to hand off its more than 1,000 clients this week, after the state court administration terminated its contract.
The circumstances surrounding the end of the firm’s contract with the Judicial Council of California are not entirely clear. But leaders of the East Bay Family Defenders said the conclusion of its three-year run was unwanted and sudden for the firm, which served clients in a more holistic way than traditional practice — pairing attorneys with a social worker and a parent advocate with lived experience.
Although the $1.5 million annual contract to represent 1,100 parents and 80 children in Alameda County dependency courts was relatively small, it had attracted national attention among child welfare attorneys. From New York to Oklahoma and Colorado, there has been a slow but steady growth in the “interdisciplinary” model of representing parents — a model shown to reduce the time children spend in foster care and to hasten family reunifications.
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