Attorneys who specialize in family practice may experience significant rates of mood disorders and substance reliance. Law schools typically do not provide supportive coursework or mentoring to help students learn to manage their feelings and those of crisis-impacted clients. Lawyers may well consider that understanding emotional needs and providing emotional support does not fall within their codes of practice. Societal stigma may prevent family attorneys and their clients from seeking therapy. Small-town attorneys may be particularly vulnerable to professional stress and safety concerns. The purpose of this study was to explore and understand the lived experiences of family attorneys practicing in small towns. Semi-structured interviews of five family attorneys practicing in small towns in New England revealed professional and personal challenges related to compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, and burnout, as well as safety concerns for themselves, their associates, and their families. Some reported resistance to therapy due to stigma or unfamiliarity with the process, though all validated therapy as a tool for distressed clients. Future research could identify ways in which couple/family therapists and family attorneys can collaborate to effectively and comprehensively meet the needs of clients who are experiencing challenging life transitions, and to support the ongoing emotional health needs of lawyers.

Psychological evaluations are frequently used in extreme hardship immigration cases in the United States. These evaluations are complex; they are inherently ambiguous, and they require extensive training and specialized knowledge. General guidance for mental health professionals is available from professional organizations, the federal government, and articles in the legal and mental health literature. However, there is a lack of detailed guidance, best practices, training, and supervision so many evaluators learn on their own. Unfortunately, this has resulted in assessment processes and evaluation reports that vary widely in terms of professionalism and quality which negatively impacts the vulnerable families seeking these services. The purpose of this exploratory study is to identify current practices of immigration attorneys and mental health professionals engaged in producing psychological evaluations for extreme hardship cases. This study utilized classic grounded theory (Glaser & Holton, 2004) to analyze interviews of thirteen study participants and redacted psychological evaluations. Credibility was identified as the core variable for this study; it accounted for the greatest variance of behavior between the participants. In conceptualizing why participants sought credibility, the Grounded Theory of striving for credibility in the face of ambiguity arose. This theory captures how struggles for human rights often evoke moral and ethical dilemmas regarding fairness and justice, which are integral values to the legal and mental health professions. However, the ambiguity and lack of external feedback inherent in extreme hardship evaluations necessitates the need for evaluators to create their own processes, rely on internal standards of excellence, and thus develop a sense of meaning for doing the work. Participants who were passionate about this work appeared to have successfully completed a meaning-making process (Park, 2010) and when positive meaning was no (open full item for complete abstract)

This paper examines the potential differences in sentencing outcomes for public defenders compared with private attorneys. I explore the economic literature for explanations, implications, and results. There is a need for extensive research within the field of economics to provide empirical results to offset the mostly game-theoretically dominated discussion of the criminal justice system. The results are inconclusive due to a lack of statistical significance and potential selection bias in the data. Future research relating to this study is also discussed.