Daniel Pollack

18-B attorneys and social workers collaborate to improve legal outcomes by combining legal expertise with social insights. This teamwork helps identify and address barriers like housing, mental health, and trauma, fostering better compliance, understanding, and tailored interventions, especially in family and child welfare cases. Their partnership promotes accountability, supports family preservation, and offers a more humane, context-aware approach that benefits clients, courts, and society by encouraging growth, recovery, and stability.

Sextortion succeeds because it learns what matters most to its victims. It finds the secret that feels impossible to reveal and turns it into a weapon.

Divorce decisions are often made with incomplete info. Using Annie Duke's “Thinking in Bets,” the article advises treating legal choices like bets—accepting uncertainty, weighing risks, and considering the other side's perspective. Even smart people are prone to biases, so litigants should assess probabilities, avoid chasing irrelevant info, and act strategically. Success depends on making the best decisions with limited info and embracing uncertainty.

Laws against child grooming are crucial for prevention and early intervention. States like Montana, Wisconsin, and Texas have effective, distinct approaches, often focusing on clear definitions and patterns of behavior. Federal laws support interstate and online cases. As technology evolves, laws must adapt to new digital methods of grooming, emphasizing clear language and flexibility to enable early action and effective enforcement.

Child protection agencies aren't liable if they try, but fail, to locate a parent—what matters is whether they acted reasonably. Courts assess the quality and persistence of their efforts, like contacting relatives or law enforcement, and whether they escalated when needed. Agencies should keep clear records to show they acted diligently within realistic limits. Because families move and risks change quickly, agencies aren't responsible for every tragedy but must be judged by reasonable, good-faith efforts, not perfection.

Family law attorneys generally advise caution before parents strap on a camera-equipped device to document a co-parent.

Encouragement toward resolution is baked into the mediator's job. But when does encouragement tip into pressure that so thwarts the goal of self-determination that trial is the only alternative?

The central question is not whether an algorithm can predict a later event, such as a subsequent report, investigation, substantiation, placement, or service referral. Instead, agencies should ask whether using a model produces better real-world outcomes than current human decision making alone.

Adoption is traditionally framed as an act centered on the child's best interests, grounded in permanence and emotional commitment. When litigation appears to be a driving factor, it risks undermining public trust in that institution.

This model does not suggest that behavioral intervention alone is sufficient, nor does it minimize the complexity of serious mental illness. Rather, it highlights the unfortunate consequences of providing psychiatric care without accessible, structured skill-building and supervised implementation.