Virginia Lawyers Weekly

Starting this fall, the University of Virginia law school will offer a clinic designed to help low-income families resolve legal issues through mediation or other options outside of a courtroom.

The yearlong Family Alternative Dispute Resolution Clinic will focus primarily on custody, divorce, visitation and support issues.

The clinic will partner with the Mediation Center of Charlottesville, which takes court-referred cases from the juvenile, domestic relations and circuit courts.

“We expect most of the cases we are going to get are going to deal with child custody and visitation issues, parenting-plan questions, probably child-support calculations and possibly spousal support,” clinic instructor Richard Balnave said. The clinic also may tackle some issues in divorce cases. “We can help people in mediation work out a lot of the details of the separation.”

Students in the clinic will co-mediate with the Mediation Center’s experienced and certified family mediators, he said.

The clinic will also work with the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society to accept referrals for collaborative law cases, in which clients retain their own lawyer, but in a less-adversarial setting than a typical family law case adjudicated in court. Clinic instructor Kimberly Emery, assistant dean for pro bono and public interest, recently designed training for local family law attorneys so they could assist in such cases free of charge.

With the new clinic, the Law School now offers 19 clinical courses.

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