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Mining the Gold in Flawed Forensic Custody Reports

By Jeffrey P. Wittmann

Matrimonial attorneys who engage in trial practice know that sinking feeling when: 1) a forensic custody report arrives and offers opinions that work to the benefit of the parent being represented; yet 2) it becomes apparent that the process and/or reasoning used by the evaluator were flawed in meaningful ways, rendering the favorable opinion vulnerable. Some reports are based on inadequate data, a long list of serious technical errors, ethically questionable behavior, and/or custody-related reasoning that is either profoundly illogical or in direct opposition to peer-reviewed, replicated research.

It is important to remember that, just as the task for attorneys of forming legal case strategy and assessing different litigation options is a human judgment process susceptible to procedural and judgment error (simply because the lawyer is a member of the species homo sapiens), the same is true for the custody assessment process. This means that one can actually expect certain forms of error to contaminate most assessment reports, whether as the result of these tendencies toward judgmental mistakes, deficient professional skills, or because of certain factors that distorted the evaluator's method, database, or reasoning.

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