June 16, 2003

Court reform could save money, expert says

   By Oliver Mackson
   Times Herald-Record
   omackson@th-record.com
   
   The concept is called "One family, one judge."
   It has the blessing of the country's biggest, most influential group of legal eagles, the American Bar Association. And in the eyes of Family Court experts, it's the ideal way to manage the court: Put everything under one roof, just the way – ideally – a family would be. If a family's been stung by domestic violence, if there's a question of who gets the children and who gets the living room set, hash that all out in one courtroom.
   That's not done well in New York. The state's top judges say so themselves. And maybe it's not done well anywhere. Chief Administrative Judge Jonathan Lippman won't cite a state whose system he regards as an example for setting up a Family Court. "Nowhere do we feel that the whole picture has been put together," he says.
   But some states are streamlining things. A few years ago, Ohio latched onto federal funding to help pay for the merger of three family court divisions: probate, domestic relations and juvenile.
   After a study of the court structure, it was decided that a cookie-cutter approach wouldn't work everywhere. Ohio's like New York in that it has some big cities, like Cleveland and Columbus; it's got some suburbs and it's got some rural areas. So authorities decided on flexibility. In some places, all three courts were physically combined. In others, they were linked electronically.
   Last year, Ohio hired a family court education specialist to make sure that judges were getting well-rounded training in all aspects of family law.
    "Right now, what we're doing is hiring case-management specialists to help the judges," said Doug Stephens, Ohio's director of judicial and court services.
   Judge Sharon Cooney, a Buffalo-area Family Court judge, is the only New Yorker on the board of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.
   Ask her who's getting things right in Family Court these days and she looks west to California. She reels off a list of innovations: mediation, treatment courts that eliminate adversarial roles in court and the concept of one family, one judge.
   Still, it's not perfect.
   "The only thing that we are better at in New York," Cooney said, "is that they still divide between the juvenile delinquent courts and the juvenile dependency courts, which are the abuse and neglect courts."
   In the end, says Ken Jockers of the nonprofit Fund for Modern Courts, money might do the most persuasive talking when it comes to reforming New York's courts.
   "Ultimately, the folks in the Assembly and the Senate have got to sign on to making the Family Court, and the court system as a whole, more friendly and responsive to people's needs," he said.
   But with a multibillion-dollar budget chasm yawning in Albany and the long-term picture looking even more bleak, Jockers says the most compelling reason for streamlining the courts might have less to do with people and more to do with money: "$130 million in judicial savings."