2025 Attorney Training on Early Legal Advocacy
April 15 & 16, 2025 in Boston, Massachusetts
Preventive legal advocacy and pre-petition programs play a crucial role in reducing over-reliance on the child welfare system by focusing on early legal intervention and holistic support for at-risk families and parents facing child protection investigations. These programs address underlying civil legal issues and other barriers impacting family stability before they lead to family separation. By providing legal guidance, social services, and resources to at-risk families, early legal advocacy programs promote family integrity, protect against the trauma of child welfare interventions, and reduce entries into foster care. High quality legal representation for parents involved in child abuse and neglect proceedings is crucial to ensuring due process and parental rights. To expand and improve legal representation to parents, many jurisdictions have implemented new models of parent representation in child abuse and neglect proceedings, including pre-petition legal representation.
This training will include presentations from the ABA and affiliated faculty along with group discussions and action planning to assist attendees in developing and implementing pre-petition legal representation advocacy services in their jurisdictions. In order to help facilitate the development of new programs, this training will provide attendees an opportunity to 1) make important connections with national experts and peers in the field and 2) learn about different models of service delivery and best practices for early legal representation.
Who should attend?
The training is designed for teams of two court or child welfare system professionals who are interested in learning more about early legal advocacy models in their jurisdiction. Teams may include roles such as juvenile officers, parent attorneys, child welfare agency representatives, caseworkers, or a Court Improvement Program (CIP) director. If you are interested and available to attend, please register.
All registrations are subject to approval. You will be notified once your team registration is approved.
Please note: there is no registration fee for this event. NCJFCJ grant funding will cover travel costs in accordance with the NCJFCJ Travel Policy. This includes airfare and hotel. Per diem and ground transportation will be reimbursed after the event.
Please note: This event is still pending final approval from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Please do not make any travel arrangements until further notice.