Amy Karp, CAFL’s Training Director, has been selected to receive the 2018 American Bar Association Mark Hardin Award. The award is presented annually by the ABA to honor an attorney, law professor, judge, or legislator who has shown achievement and commitment to legal scholarship and systems change in the field of child welfare. Amy has clearly done that – and more – during her 23 years with CPCS.
Having served as an intern with CPCS during law school, Amy joined CPCS as a staff attorney in 1995 – just in time to help us establish our first CAFL trial offices in Springfield and Salem. She quickly became a key contributor to CPCS’s efforts to improve the quality of practice by CAFL private and staff attorneys.
Amy became CAFL’s first Training Director in 2000. At the time, there was a limited amount of training for child welfare attorneys in Massachusetts – despite the fact that child welfare cases can result in the permanent removal of children from their families; they implicate fundamental constitutional rights; they involve a complex and ever-changing body of state and federal law; and they require attorneys to be familiar with physical and mental health issues, child development, and social services. To remedy that, Amy substantially expanded the scope and volume of programs available to our lawyers, training them, or helping others train them, on the wide array of topics attorneys need to master in order to represent our clients effectively. Amy also improved training programs that were already in place to reflect changes in the law, how adults learn, and our growing appreciation for the complexity and legal and personal challenges of the work that CPCS lawyers undertake. Over the last few years her work on private attorney certification training, new staff attorney training, and related programs has been particularly important. In response to a massive increase in the number of children DCF is removing from their families, Amy has led her team in significantly increasing the availability of those trainings, enabling us to increase the number of private and staff attorneys taking CAFL cases.
Amy’s work has also included, among other things:
- creating, organizing, and leading countless other training and education programs for CAFL trial and appellate lawyers and mentors, including trial preparation and trial skills trainings and programs on the role of race in the child welfare system
- establishing training programs in new subject-matter areas in response to judicial and legislative expansions of the right to counsel in cases involving families
- providing or helping to provide a number of CPCS’s agency-wide and cross-divisional training programs (including organizing the 2017 CPCS Annual Conference)
- helping develop detailed performance standards – which include practical advice – for attorneys representing parents and children in child welfare cases
- leading the development, through writing and editing, of several editions of a comprehensive manual on child welfare practice
- fostering the development of other CPCS trainers
- serving on various statewide committees, including the Court Improvement Program’s steering committee (through which she has brought hundreds of thousands of dollars of federal grant money to CPCS)
- providing thoughtful, insightful, and practical advice to countless lawyers over the years
Amy’s devotion to having a well-trained bar reflects her deep and abiding commitment to protecting the rights of CPCS clients whose families are confronted by the awesome power of the state, which in CAFL cases is interfering with their right to remain together – too often in a heavy-handed and trauma-insensitive manner. Amy has been a driving force in promoting zealous advocacy for children and parents, and she has been instrumental in making CPCS’s Children and Family Law Division a national model of representation for parents and children. Her exceptionally high standards, her refusal to accept the status quo, her intelligence, her writing and editing skills, and her incredible capacity to teach and support other attorneys make her a fitting recipient for this year’s Mark Hardin Award.
You can read more about Amy and the award here: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/child_law/resources/mark-hardin-award.html