The relative handful of Valley attorneys who devote the bulk of their practice to juvenile dependency law rarely make it into the news.
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Superior Court Judge Ron Reinstein gives high marks to the countys juvenile bar.
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Dependency lawyers long have embraced the adage that defines their little slice of the legal system: out of sight, out of mind.
The closed nature of dependency proceedings had made that easier for the attorneys to lay low. (Supporters of keeping dependency hearings closed usually cite privacy concerns, and fears of "re-victimizing" the children involved. However, positive examples, such as Minnesota, which opened all of its juvenile hearings in 2002, suggest that such fears are unfounded.)
According to Mark Kennedy, the outgoing director of the Office of Contract Counsel, the extent of the large paydays to dependency lawyers began to reveal itself a few years ago.
"This is something that we have been grappling with for a while," says Kennedy, who has been in charge of overseeing the dependency and delinquency contracts, among other duties. "I am not unhappy that the general public is finally going to know about it."
Kennedy says the county is determined to put a stop to what he calls "the juvenile dependency gravy train.
"I must admit that I fell into a trap. Until I became aware of what was going on with these lawyers, including the money they're making, I assumed that giving an attorney the benefit of the doubt when he or she was working on behalf of kids was the right thing to do," he says.
"Shame on me. Many of these people essentially have created annuities for themselves because dependencies can stay open forever, or at least until a child turns 18. And let's say Mom has a new child, which isn't at all unusual. Mom's lawyer will represent her in the new case or cases, year after year after year, and will continue to get paid for it."
The blunt-spoken bureaucrat, who is an attorney and former FBI agent, likens the dependency bar "to a bunch of monks from a smallish order who perform their own 'Gregorian chants,' their own unique legal language."
But fancy courtroom language doesn't make it death penalty work, Kennedy says, adding that "it sure as hell doesn't mean that these people should be reeling in the money like they have been."
Though the stakes in dependency cases are high, the script learned by judges, Child Protective Services caseworkers, lawyers, and clients at hearings is repeated practically verbatim in every case.
Unfortunately for many laypeople, the terms used in dependency court often are arcane — Latin words abound, as do acronyms and incomprehensible titles of proceedings (such as the Initial Permanency Planning Hearing).
Judges and court commissioners assigned to handle dependencies often place children into foster care (sometimes for extended periods), order family reunification services (by law, judges must take pains to try to "reunify" families, even when the parents clearly are incapable of caring for themselves), return kids to their parents' custody, or, after a long process, allow adoptions to proceed and order the termination of parental rights.
In dependency court, as elsewhere in Maricopa County's sprawling legal system, any litigant surely can catch a lousy break, a raw deal. Maybe a down-on-her-luck mom undeservedly will lose custody of her children for a stretch, or a child will be placed in a rotten foster-care setting.
But generally speaking, parents who make continued good-faith efforts to improve their lot — mentally, physically, emotionally, economically — usually will be reunited with their child or children.
(Between April and September 2006, according to a report filed by the Arizona Department of Economic Security, just 90 severance cases were completed in Maricopa County. All but one of those ended with termination of parental rights, with the exception being a case that DES withdrew before trial.)
Janelle McEachern (pronounced mick-can), another of the county's most prominent (translation: very busy, very well-paid) dependency attorneys, concedes that her work "isn't rocket science, and it does take more in the way of organizational skills than probably anything else. But that doesn't mean that a lawyer who is experienced in this part of the law isn't more valuable to a client and to the system by knowing how to streamline and keep things moving along than a greenhorn."
That dependency law isn't "rocket science" is one of the few points about which McEachern and Mark Kennedy at the Office of Contract Counsel seem to agree.
"The language and the process you see inside dependency court may be unknown to most people, including other lawyers who don't do that kind of work," says Kennedy, "but it's pretty basic when you cut through everything. I know firsthand that these cases generally aren't that complicated."
By that, Kennedy is referring to his recent work on about 20 cases as a dependency attorney in Gila County, whose seat is in Globe. He says he took on the extra work "so I could see how these kinds of cases really work, and what a lawyer has to do to serve a client well and maybe get a decent outcome that's right for everyone."
Kennedy says he's offended by the first-time "meet-and-greets" of attorneys and their clients, similar to the one at the Mesa courthouse described at the start of this story.
