The Judge Wants a Custody Evaluation
You are an LPC in private practice. The 10-year-old child you have counseled for anxiety for eleven sessions is the subject of a newly filed custody case. The family court judge appoints you to 'perform a full custody evaluation of both parents, administer psychological testing to each of them, review all Children's Division and school records, and submit a recommended parenting plan.' The parents' attorneys follow up by requesting that you administer the MMPI-2 and the Rorschach to both parents and appear as an expert witness. You have had no forensic training, no assessment practicum beyond a single graduate course, and no supervision in either instrument. The judge's appointment letter is copied to all counsel and reads as an order.
1. Can you accept the appointment as written? Analyze the scope-of-practice and role-conflict problems.
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No - the appointment as written must be declined or, at most, substantially narrowed.
- The role conflict is dispositive. You are the child's treating counselor. A custody evaluator must be independent, must obtain informed consent for a non-confidential forensic role from both parents, and must be able to weigh competing hypotheses without having already invested in one family narrative. The treating counselor cannot become the evaluator of the same family; the evaluator and the therapist roles are structurally incompatible, which is why ethics standards treat this as a prohibited multiple relationship rather than a matter of careful scheduling.
- Competence is a separate bar. Assessment within one's scope of practice requires training, supervised experience, and knowledge of the instrument's norms and limits. A single graduate course is not competence to administer, interpret, and defend a projective instrument in court. Administering the Rorschach with no training is not a scope question about counseling generally; it is a fitness question about you specifically.
- A judicial appointment does not expand a license. Appointed or not, you remain bound by the same scope of practice and standards of conduct; a court order cannot authorize a professional to practice beyond competence.
- Also flagged: the order directs you to review Children's Division records, which requires releases or a court order specific to those records, and to retain raw test data whose disclosure is itself restricted.
2. Draft your position to the court. What will you offer to do instead, and on what terms?
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Decline the evaluation, offer the treatment role, and put it in writing to the court with copies to all counsel.
- State the role conflict first, in plain language: a treating counselor is not an independent evaluator, and the child's therapy would be compromised by converting the counselor into the person who recommends a parenting plan. This is not a scheduling problem that extra hours can solve.
- State the competence limit candidly. Advise the court that you are not qualified to administer and interpret projective instruments or to conduct a forensic custody evaluation, without apology or embellishment.
- Offer what you can properly do: continue treating the child; provide a factual treatment summary and testify as a fact witness about what you observed and did, if the court orders it and the parents authorize release (with the child's guardian ad litem consulted); and assist with a referral list of qualified forensic evaluators - ideally several, so the court selects rather than you appearing to favor a side.
- Ask the court to appoint an independent evaluator and, if the court wants continuity, to permit you to consult with that evaluator within the limits the parents' consent permits.
- Be explicit that the child's therapy record should not become the raw material of a custody fight without the court's considered order.
Document the appointment, your written response, and your outreach to the child's guardian ad litem and the parents.
3. Suppose the court accepts your declination but orders you to testify as a fact witness, and the husband's attorney asks: 'In your professional opinion, is the mother fit to have primary custody?' How do you respond?
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Answer the question you are qualified to answer, and decline the one you are not.
- Stay in the fact-witness lane: what you observed in sessions, what the child said, what interventions you used, and how the child responded. That is testimony within your role and your training.
- Decline the ultimate-opinion question without hostility: 'I haven't conducted a custody evaluation, I haven't interviewed both parents under a forensic protocol, and I haven't assessed the mother's parenting in the contexts a custody determination requires. I can describe what I saw in treatment; I can't offer a custody opinion.'
- Do not get drawn into a de facto evaluation on the stand. Opposing counsel will try to convert a series of narrow questions into an opinion; the answer is a consistent, calm restatement of role limits.
- Watch the confidentiality boundary in real time. Answer only to what the court's order and the parents' authorizations permit; if a question reaches beyond the scope of the order, ask to be heard before answering.
- Afterward, document the testimony given, and debrief the child's treatment: a court appearance is a clinical event in the child's therapy and should be processed in session at the child's pace.