Children may unnecessarily enter foster care because their parents are unable to resolve legal issues that affect their safety and well-being in their home. There is a movement across the country to address the fact that parents in child welfare cases receive inadequate representation. Multidisciplinary legal offices are emerging that provide preventive legal and social work advocacy to families at risk of losing children to foster care. Preliminary data suggests that these programs can have an enormous impact on preventing children from entering foster care. Not only do these multidisciplinary advocacy programs keep children with their families, they also have the potential to save child welfare systems significant amounts of money by reducing the need to rely on foster care, which can be expensive. This article published in the William Mitchell Law Review details how a family’s unmet legal needs can place a child at risk of entering foster care, discusses the developing model to address this need, and explores ways to fund and support the model. More research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of the model. However, preliminary data demonstrate that providing families with a multidisciplinary team helps keep children with their families by resolving legal issues that can destabilize the family unit.
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