The training program is geared towards attorneys acting for DV survivors
The American Bar Association (ABA) is offering a pathway to free litigation training geared towards attorneys acting for domestic violence survivors, reported the American Bar Association Journal.
The US Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women has provided funding to the Commission on Domestic and Sexual Violence, which freely offers the Trial Skills Institute and other domestic violence litigation training. The commission gives priority to Office on Violence Against Women grantees, as well as attorneys at legal services and nonprofit organisations that could be grantees, according to the ABA Journal.
The four-day training program follows the teaching model set by the National Institute for Trial Advocacy. Trainees are tasked with serving as counsel in a hypothetical domestic violence case, putting together theory, opening statements, closing arguments, direct examinations and cross-examinations, the ABA Journal explained.
With each display of a skill, a faculty comprising longtime litigators and advocates for domestic violence survivors will provide feedback.
“We need highly skilled and confident attorneys in domestic violence court. Their competence improves the standard of practice in our courtrooms and secures better outcomes for survivors”, explained Amy Halbrook, faculty member and associate dean for experiential learning at the Northern Kentucky University Salmon P. Chase College of Law.
Long-term Trial Skills Institute faculty member and director of Danu Center for Strategic Advocacy’s Confidentiality Institute Alicia Aiken added that “representing domestic and sexual violence survivors is absolutely a specialty”.
“You have to be a really excellent trauma-informed lawyer, and you have to think about client privacy and confidentiality in a heightened way. Ethics questions are different and hard, and the judges come at you with a different attitude. Attorneys have to be prepared to handle that”, she said.
Next month, the Commission on Domestic and Sexual Violence will conduct via Zoom training to bolster the litigation skills of attorneys acting for the survivors of domestic violence in contested custody cases.
