Evaluating Evaluations: An Attorney’s Handbook for Analyzing Child Custody Reports
Evaluating Evaluations: An Attorney's Handbook for Analyzing Child Custody Reports can make all the difference for attorneys representing parents or children. While there are many worthy tomes on the market that discuss custody evaluations, what makes Dr. Jeffrey Wittmann’s Evaluating Evaluations unique is that it takes up where the others leave off! It provides a comprehensive and detailed step-by-step system that attorneys can apply to custody reports to discern both their strengths and weakness. Dr. Wittmann presents his Custody Assessment Analysis System (CAAS) in an easily understood and readily applied format that the attorney can put to work immediately in his or her practice. He essentially leads the reader through a process for parsing reports developed over his years of functioning as a trial consultant that is rooted in the forensic and clinical judgment literature and that provides detailed annotations for each of the model’s main components. When used side-by-side with the companion Custody Assessment Analysis System Workbook what was once a daunting venture into a morass of psycho-jargon becomes a clear roadmap to astute analysis and, ultimately, to persuasive courtroom presentation.
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About The Author
Dr. Jeffrey Wittmann
Dr. Jeffrey WittmannDr. Wittmann is a licensed psychologist and trial consultant whose practice concentrates on trial support for attorneys in custody and access matters and on forensic work-product reviews. He serves as a consultant for major law firms nationally and has provided custody evaluation services both at county clinics and in private practice since 1985. He previously held an appointment as Adjunct Clinical Professor at SUNY Albany where he taught forensic psychology at the doctoral level. Dr. Wittmann is a recognized expert on the intersection of law and psychology, on professional practices in the child custody area, and on Frye/Daubert issues related to expert testimony in family matters. He is regularly on the faculty for training seminars offered to attorneys and mental health professionals, and has been a frequently utilized scholar-trainer for judges in Family, Supreme, and Appellate courts in New York and elsewhere nationally. Dr. Wittmann is on the editorial board of the Matrimonial Strategist and previously served on the board for the Journal of Child Custody. He is the author of “Custody Chaos, Personal Peace” (Perigee, 2001) and of numerous professional articles regarding forensic psychology. Together with Timothy Tippins Esq., he is the author of Empirical and Ethical Problems with Custody Recommendations: A Call for Clinical Humility and Judicial Vigilance, an award-winning article published in the Family Court Review in 2005 that generated widespread scholarly debate and that is a frequently-used template for critiquing the custody evaluation process. His CAAS model for analyzing child custody evaluations is the first comprehensive tool designed specifically to assist attorneys in negotiations and trial preparation, a model he outlines in his book entitled "Evaluating Evaluations: An attorney's Handbook for Analyzing Child Custody Reports" (MatLaw, 2013).