We had a hearing a week and a half ago to decide who would do our parenting evaluation. I wanted the county to do it, because they are cheap, fast, and make it a priority to talk to school staff, who know more about what is going on in the kids' daily lives than just about anyone else. He, on the other hand, requested the guy who did our first evaluation. The guy who disappeared on us for months, was a nightmare in every way, and who Franco's own attorney had to threaten with various professional sanctions to get him to issue his final report. He's also one of the most expensive evaluators in town, costing at least 7 times more than the county. But he let Franco have his 50/50 parenting time back, despite Franco's demonstrated and ongoing history of abuse, and his very worrisome psych eval, and without consulting almost any of the witnesses I provided, and, and, and...I could rant about this for days, so of course we should go with him.
But, see, the whole reason I had to go this route was because Franco said he was too broke to pay our Parenting Time Coordinator, and I didn't have any recourse besides the court to get help with major issues we were having. And now he suddenly has all of this money to throw around? Plus, this guy was so bad that both attorneys were talking about trying to blackball him. That was the case we planned to make to the judge, and I still had the emails from Franco's lawyer about the old evaluator and all of the money woes to substantiate it.
Then the night before the hearing, his attorney made the very strange move of filing a pre-trial memo (this is basically almost unheard of for a 15 minute hearing). The memo contained a bunch of overt lies intended just to make me look bad, and to make a case for sticking with the evaluator we used before. Basically, he said that I'd been changing the kids' medical and mental-health care providers willy-nilly, whenever I heard something I didn't like, and argued that my asking for a different evaluator was doing the same thing. But I had emails for each change of provider that showed either the reason (one just moved, for instance) or a discussion between the two of us about why a change might be needed, and with him agreeing to it. So, my lawyer did her own pre-trial memo with those emails attached, and the letter from Franco's lawyer, and so forth, and sent that in the morning of, and I almost died of anxiety in the intervening hours***
You might imagine that a hearing at the courthouse is a very formal process. You go into the courtroom, sit next to your lawyer and wait quietly and respectfully while the other party and his lawyer also sit quietly and respectfully in their designated chairs. There is a lot of nervous whispering and rustling of papers, until the judge comes in, and everyone stands up, You are told to sit, and then everything proceeds in a well-choreographed order. Arguments are made, testimony is heard, the judge rules, etc.
Sometimes it's like that. Usually it's not, especially not for short hearings or when the parties are planning to settle. The nervous sitting is true, but the lawyers often banter with the court clerk, or whisper to their asshole clients, who then laugh awkwardly and artificially loudly to conjure an air of power and surety that the asshole will prevail. Then one or both of the attorneys ask if they can just do the whole thing in the judge's chambers. The clerk asks the judge, who almost always says yes, the lawyers disappear into a room of the side of the court room, the door is shut, and the civilians just sit around in awkward silence, straining to hear any murmurings that might clue them into what is going on. Then a few minutes later, the lawyers pop out with some notes that one of them will have to type up and file later, they grab their clients and escort them out for hushed recaps in the hallway, and that's it.
That was mostly how this went, except it was pretty easy to hear what was going on. Franco's mud-slinging ploy blew up in his face, on account of how his lies were all documented in his and his attorney's own hand to be false, and when the judge found out he'd been refusing to pay the court-appointed parenting time coordinator, she apparently got profoundly pissed. Franco's lawyer responded to all of this by shouting at everyone at great length for about 15 minutes straight, trying to get his various demands met. Exactly what he said was unclear most of the time, but you have to shout pretty damn loud for more than a murmur to come through those heavy wooden doors, so it was clearly intense, and went way over the allotted time for the hearing, so the next group of lawyers kept popping in to see when it was going to be over.
And then my lawyer came out beaming. We were granted everything we asked for. We got the county to do the evaluation, he has to pay the PTC immediately and cooperate with her fully, and the kids will be assigned their own attorney by the court. He did win the right to pay for a new psych eval for himself (the county doesn't do or require them) and submit it to them, because he apparently doesn't like the one that the old evaluator did. My lawyer didn't even contest that, and I wouldn't have had I known about it, because I honestly think his first eval was as mild and generous as he could possibly hope for, so if he wants to pay to learn that himself, he's more than welcome Besides, even in the off change if he does get one back that says he is the pinnacle of mental health and stability, there are plenty of inexplicably rabid emails running around that demonstrate otherwise.
In any case, it went better than I expected, and things are moving along surprisingly quickly and efficiently. The court order was filed, we just attended the mandatory mediation appointment you have to go to before the county will start on the evaluation yesterday (more on that in part 2 of the update, because that was, unlike the hearing, really, really, REALLY not OK,) and we just have to redo our parenting classes before this thing can get under way. All of this is so far going far more smoothly than any court proceeding I have every been a part of, and I'm hopeful that this trend will continue.
***The panic came about because the entire reason Franco was awarded 50/50 in the first place was that back in Santa Barbara, I had a really bad, discount lawyer, because he was all I could afford, and I didn't know enough about lawyering to know that he was bad. We had all kinds of really good evidence assembled showing how unstable and dangerous Franco had been (however bad he is now, he was worse, or at least more physically violent then, so this was police report bad, etc.), and why he shouldn't get the 50/50 he was requesting. The Friday afternoon before the hearing, Franco's lawyer filed a pre-trial memo laying out his case, which included a bunch of lies about things I had never done or said, and could prove I never did or said, etc. My lawyer said not to worry, he just needed to present everything orally, and didn't need to file a memo. And then sometime on Sunday, I think it was, I checked the Santa Barbara county court website to confirm the hearing time, and found that the judge had already written and posted an extensive preliminary ruling, 100% in Franco's favor, because Franco's arguments were uncontested, and therefore presumed to be true. I FREAKED OUT like no one has ever freaked out, and called my lawyer, and he said oops. He practices in both Ventura and Santa Barbara, and in Ventura, it's all oral presentations, and forgot that in Santa Barbara, you have to pre-submit your arguments in writing. It's OK, he said, I'll just explain it tomorrow. But he didn't get to explain, because we had an ancient, asshole judge who said, in essence, too bad, so sad, you are too late He wouldn't look at our evidence, the emails, the police and medical reports, any of it. He did at least slightly amend his finding when he found out that I had not been keeping the kids away from Franco, as the pre-trial memo had said, but that was it. I lost everything in the universe by a simple default because my lawyer failed to submit a pre-trial memo, and that ruling that just restated and corroborated all of Franco's awful lies about me remained posted up there, for anyone to find when googling my name for several years afterwards (it's finally down). In any case, my panic this time was unwarranted, because my current attorney is not a retarded asshat, and the judges here don't work like that, anyway. Explanatory flashback concluded.
