Evaluating Evaluations: An Attorney’s Handbook for Analyzing Child Custody Reports (2nd Edition 2024)

Description

Evaluating Evaluations: An Attorney’s Handbook for Analyzing Child Custody Reports (Second Edition) 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-Revised (CAAS-R) 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.
The second edition includes a significant refinement and update of the model first offered in the 2013 edition: Key professional guidelines for child custody evaluation have been revised since the first release — this updated version annotates its components with these updated treatises so the attorney’s negotiations, direct or cross are made more persuasive. The original bias typology has been expanded. Attorneys under significant time constraints are also offered a “Short-Cut Analysis” process for rapid and incisive assessment of an evaluator’s reasoning about a case.
Although originally designed to assist attorneys, evaluators and experts conducting peer-reviews have also come to rely on the CAAS-R model in their professional work.

FOR ATTORNEYS: Comprehensive, efficient, and persuasive analysis of custody evaluations.
FOR EVALUATORS: An organized guide for improving evaluation technique and report-sturdiness.
FOR PEER-REVIEWERS: A structured model for conducting thorough, fair, and effective reviews.