Conversations About Divorce And Family Restructuring With The Hon. Angie Arkin, CO District Court Judge (Retired)
Marital agreements, divorces, and child custody cases are messy, emotional, and often leave families feeling ill-served by courts. What can judges and lawyers do to make family law a bit less overwhelming for them? Honorable Angie Arkin, CO District Court Judge (retired), shares her vast experience and expertise in this area as one of the nation’s leading experts in judicial education and family dynamics. She talks about the Colorado Supreme Court’s revolutionary initiative: the introduction of Licensed Legal Paraprofessionals (LLP) who provide families with essential legal advice at court. Judge Angie also explains why judges should let go of their judgmental mindset when dealing with family law cases to end up with the best possible outcomes for every family.
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Listen to the podcast here
Conversations About Divorce And Family Restructuring With The Hon. Angie Arkin, CO District Court Judge (Retired)
This is Consilium’s show where we bring in experts to talk with us about issues related to families, family law, and how to make sure that we are doing what we need to do as lawyers, judges, financial professionals, therapists, mental health therapists, anyone who works with families in divorce are doing the job that families deserve. We’re very honored to have Angie Arkin be part of that conversation.
One of the great premises of Consilium is that the name itself means council of wise advisors. We are very privileged and honored to bring to you this series that includes wise advisors of people who have given deep thought to issues related to families. With that, I would like to welcome Angie Arkin to our conversation and do an introduction briefly of Angie.
The Honorable Angie Arkin, now retired from the bench, is a graduate of Emory Law School. She’s licensed in Colorado, Georgia, and the District of Columbia. In August of 2000, after practicing law in Georgia and Colorado, Judge Arkin was hired as a District Court Magistrate in Arapahoe County, Colorado. She was then appointed to a District Court judgeship in the 18th Judicial District in July of 2002 and served on mixed dockets for a few years.
On July 1, 2008, Judge Arkin was assigned to a 100% domestic relations docket that she presided over until her retirement in January of 2016. In 2015, Judge Arkin was rightly chosen as a District Court judge honoree for the Colorado Judicial Institute Judicial Excellence Award and has received many other awards and accolades for her service to the Colorado bench bar and Colorado families.
Since she left the bench in 2016, she created a self-represented resource center to provide unbundled legal services to pro se litigants. In early 2017, Judge Arkin joined the Judicial Arbiter Group, where her current practice includes mediation, arbitration, med-arb, special master, and appointed judge service in domestic relations, civil, and probate cases.
She is also a leader in creating the Symposium on Race, an ongoing monthly forum for discussion of race issues in Denver, and is spearheading, and this will be part of our conversation, the License Legal Para-Professional Subcommittee of the Colorado Supreme Court Advisory Committee. I have the privilege and had the privilege of meeting Judge Arkin shortly after my appointment to the bench in 2010.
Angie, if I may, has served as a mentor and guide for me and is someone that I turn to when I have hard questions or just want to talk through challenging issues, or to even vent a little bit. Angie, thank you so much for being here, being part of the Thinking Boldly series. I’m here with my partner, cofounder of the Consilium Institute, Heidi Webb, and we welcome you to our conversation.
Thanks for asking me. It’s an honor to be here.
How Judge Angie Became Passionate In Helping Families At Court
Absolutely. We’re just thrilled. I just would like to start with it seems to me that you are very passionate about families being well-served by the courts. As I look at your history, as I look at the work that you do, as I look at the work you continue to do, even after retiring from the bench, really, it seems like you want families to be well-served by the court. Where does that come from? Where does that passion come from?
When I started practicing, which was in Georgia in 1983, I was a family lawyer. I did some civil work as well, but primarily it was representing individuals in divorce. Georgia’s a very interesting place because there is, in the constitution, jury trials of twelve for divorce. My first ever jury trial, my client was 19, his wife was 17, and they had a little girl, and her parents paid for a fancy lawyer and requested a jury trial. The case, that had essentially no assets, the only issue was the custody of the child, which was so interesting because the jury doesn’t decide custody. It decides everything else, but not custody.
They were still adamant to punish this poor little guy. That was my first experience in a jury trial. It was horrible for my client. It was terrible and incredibly expensive. I never recovered all the fees that I incurred representing him. It would have taken 30 years. It was very expensive and ridiculous. It just didn’t make any sense.
It was punitive. Of course, Georgia also had fault divorce, something that Colorado was one of the first states to get rid of. Georgia had fault divorce up until, I think, the mid-‘90s. Very different place from Colorado, about night and day, really. The way that the courts treated my clients and children and families, it was probably somewhat better in Colorado because the laws were better.
However there aren’t a lot of judicial officers who have a background in experience in family law. It’s just not something that people have as a platform from which they strive to be a judicial officer, a magistrate or a judge. That’s just interesting, but it’s problematic because, and this is true pretty much everywhere, but family law, its structure is very much filled with discretion.
That makes sense. Every family’s different. Every family comes to the court with different issues, and every family created itself differently. That’s something that’s true. It may not be true in every country, but it sure is true in the United States, that unless you’re doing something illegal, like harming your kids or harming each other in some way, you can make whatever family you want to make.
Family law is structured with so much discretion because every family that comes to court is different. Share on XWhen you get to the courtroom to undo the marriage, the laws have to be structured in a way that allows the court the discretion to see as best it can what the issues are and figure out how to move that particular family forward. Much of that is related to how you structured your own family and how you created that family and the history that you intended and unfortunately failed and of course, those hopes and dreams that are no longer going to happen.
That’s a lot of fallout for people who are in the process. It’s like your dream comes down and covers you with goo. You have to dig out from under it before you can really see the future. That comes with an awful lot of arguably narcissism and concern and fear and worry, sometimes anger, often pain. It’s just challenging. You have this family that nobody can give you a really unbiased opinion of because neither party sees it clearly.
Both parties are traumatized, are unhappy, are unwilling to acknowledge many realities at that point. Even if they’ve done good work with therapy and good legal representation, they’re still going to be probably struggling somewhat in trying to figure out what happened, what their own contribution was, if they acknowledge they contributed. How to help their children through it, how to actually see their children in the process as something other than somebody one party or the other owns. Those are struggles that many families go through when they’re divorcing. Judges in particular are not terribly well equipped to deal with it
I’m harkening back to something you said earlier. I just can’t quite get my head around it, and I just want to ask you about it. All of what you’re saying resonates so deeply. When you were talking about the idea of a jury trial, except in issues of custody in Georgia, can we just revisit that for a second because does it have to do with a dissolution of the marital assets that they’re looking at that in terms of an equity issue and a jury’s weighing in on that, or what else is not considered in that?
At that time, and I’m not certain currently if it’s still true, but at that time, Georgia was a fault state. You could get a no-fault divorce in 31 days in Georgia. It was fast and easy. If you didn’t want to get a no-fault divorce, you could claim cruel treatment, you could claim adultery, you could claim all sorts of things. In Georgia, if you proved adultery, there was no alimony.
What the jury could weigh in on, basically, in terms of a family structure which leads to all the other things that you’re talking about. How much of this was a social context and how much of this was a family, the microcosm of a family? Was it if not typical, not atypical, that a social context would weigh in on a family dynamic like that?
That was the whole point. Your community gets to judge you in this very private family dissolution. It was in the constitution in Georgia that you had the right to a jury trial of twelve. It took 2 to 3 years to get to a jury trial because the courts, the way they were structured, the terms, jury trials were all clumped in together, and domestic relations, divorce jury trials often would be continued for years. It was a way to strongarm the other person, to starve them out, to force them to take a settlement that they didn’t want.
Were all things on the table aside from custody?
Yes.
What Happens When Judges Do Not Have Family Law Experience
It’s interesting that you talk about the jury and we look at that and we’re like, “That just seems so absurd.” On some level, when you have judges that don’t have family law experience and as you said are applying their own belief system on these discretionary things, are we better off with judges? What can we do to make sure that judges are not in that same position that the community members are where they’re just deciding based on what their own experience is but really are able to focus on what they need to focus on? Does that make sense?
Yes, and I think we’re always better off with judges regardless because the War of the Roses in a courtroom, it’s a disaster, especially when there are children involved. Domestic violence cases, it was pretty regular in these cases involving jury trials in Georgia that there would be, each side would hire a private investigator. They’d dig up all the dirt they could think of. Who amongst us is perfect? I haven’t met that person. I look in the mirror every day, I haven’t met that person.
It was just catastrophic particularly the children, if there were children, to go through this horrible public shaming essentially. If you’re asking my formative time learning about how problematic conflict and lack of understanding of the complexity of what families go through can harm people permanently. They can harm adults, so clearly children are significantly even more harmed.
Of course, the ongoing conflict, which if you have an ugly conflictual divorce, often sows the seeds for many more years of conflict. Every once in a while, it’s wonderful that people who go through this horrible divorce, they bury the hatchet, they move forward, they figure out how to get rid of the pain and the struggle. Quite unfortunately, way too many of them are so stuck by the time they get to that ugly place of post-decree, they just can’t move forward with their own lives. They are too entrenched in the conflict to be able to see the future. We all have to move forward. It’s just where forward is for you.
I think that just the neural pathways that get trodden in a trial become a go-to for many people. It becomes their learned expectation that this is what this experience what they default to. Sometimes subconsciously, I think. It’s not even that they wish to continue on that path. They just can’t get out of their own way. I think that is clearly a flaw of the process.
How Judge Angie Turned Passion Into Action
I think one of the challenges is, and as I’m thinking about the community deciding versus a judge deciding, the judge has the advantage that they know the law, but they don’t necessarily know or understand families or family dynamics or what tools they have that they can implement to help that family become self-governing after divorce, which was always one of my goals when I was on the bench. You’ve talked, Angie, about your passion and where that came from. How have you, in your career, implemented or manifested that passion into action?
I wanted to be a judge from the time I was in law school because I always saw gray. Weirdly enough, I always felt like judicial officers were problem solvers. That’s what you were supposed to be. When I was first hired as a magistrate, I had the opportunity to teach at what we call in Colorado baby judge school. It’s new judge orientation, but I started doing judicial training. I had done presentations for many years, but had an opportunity to talk to judicial officers from the place of being one.
I think it was something that Heidi said but, actually, something Julie was talking about with respect to judges judging, one of the things that I have really tried to teach judges more than anything else is not to judge too much. Much of the art of being a good judicial officer in the family context is recognizing the family’s choices and not judging them.
Just figuring it out because the challenge is always people come into court and they tell you their truth, but it’s not the truth, and finding the truth is not what we’re supposed to be about. It’s just figuring out the path forward. That being said, the more you judge what other people chose to do when they had no idea they would ever come to see you, that’s horrifically unfair and it’s burdensome on them. When they made those choices, they didn’t do it to please someone else, to get accolades or props from anyone. They did those things because they thought they were best for themselves or their kids or their spouse at that time.
They gambled for a living. What? They did this, they did that. It’s just a normal human thing to judge people. Making a good judge is minimizing that. I used to talk about I did a little prosecution in Georgia for a little while, mostly related to child support enforcement and things like that, but there’s a point that comes where your knee starts to jerk, which is very dangerous because you’re supposed to be fair. You start reacting in a particular way to a particular set of circumstances and you stop seeing the human beings for somebody as that are individual. You just see, this is this, this is the right thing to do or the right result.
It is human nature to judge other people. A good judge knows how to minimize that. Share on XWhen I became a judicial officer, I felt my knee would jerk sometimes, and I would look at my knee and I’d go, “What’s going on?” They call it mindfulness now. It used to be just recognizing your triggers. What keeps you from listening the way you need to, from hearing what you don’t know but you thought you might know but really isn’t what you knew and choosing a path that is consistent with what’s best for this family?
Now, regardless of how you do that, it’s always going to be dangerous because your judgment of what’s best for people is never as good as their own. Every time I had a case, I would always tell the people, I would make an opening statement to them and say to them, “You’re not going to like what happens here.” Over the years, I learned to do that earlier and earlier in the process to try and get them to come to their own resolution because what do I know? That robe, it’s not clairvoyance. It does not give you anything but the power to decide. Brilliance, ability to manufacture money, use a crystal ball, see the past, see the future, none of that comes with it.
The oxymoron of judges needing to be non-judgmental in order to be effective is such a brilliant way to express that because I think that people do think that the robe comes with all the power that you just so clearly stated it does not, but yet you do make a decision for people to see their power to the court, knowing that it may come with bias or not, it may come with the judge’s own personal history and reaction and triggers or not.
All these things are multifactorial, but do you want to throw your lot into that or do you want to take control for yourself and create your own vision of your future as best you can, understanding you may need some assistance and guidance with some of the details in terms of framing it and how you get there. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a judge claim the importance of being non-judgmental.
What I’m admitting is that I wasn’t always perfect in that, of course not. That’s the challenge of going to court because nobody is perfect, and perfectly non-judgmental doesn’t exist. Trying to help people see that being judgmental is not our role, it’s not our job, it’s not what judges should be doing in a family court.
Why Judges Should Always Aim For The Most Positive Outcome
One of the things Angie you shared with me earlier is your favorite quote from Abraham Lincoln, and I think that what you’ve been talking about seems to resonate with the humility of that quote. Do you want to talk about that for just a minute?
Breathing is about learning, and everybody can teach you stuff. If you are open to constantly learning, then you’re going to be much more able to navigate the world. The quote is every man is my superior in that I can learn something from him. When I sent it to Julie, I said every person is my superior in that I can learn something from them, but Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have said that.
Everybody brings something to the table that’s important and that can be helpful to everybody else if you’re willing to look for it and to listen to it and to see it. Doing what Julie and I did for so many years, you see plenty of “bad parents,” people who said or did things to their kids that are just horrific and unpardonable. Even the lesser but not entirely horrific and not entirely unpardonable but just harmful.
Most of those people, and I don’t know that I’ve ever met any of them, that didn’t have other things about who they were that actually were qualities their children benefited from. It was always incredibly hard and challenging to say no, this parent can’t have contact with this child ever again because what you’re saying is there’s nothing about that human being that they have to contribute.
That’s so rare and unusual, and part of what judges should be doing in family court is recognizing that which is positive and trying to maximize it. That isn’t just for kids, it’s also for the marital estate and the opportunity to be supported but also find independence and move forward. All of those things. I don’t know how you felt about it, Julie, but every once in a while, you’d be in a case and something really magical would happen, someone would say something or a bunch of information would come in and you’d just be like, “This is the answer to help.”
It’s magical to reflect that back to the parties and say, “Wait, did you hear what you just said?” That is the coolest because it does lead to that self-recognition for the parties that they do have control over this, that they can make choices that benefit themselves and their kids in the future.
There were also times when we would get through half the day and I would call counsel and maybe the PRE or the CFI back in chambers with me and I would say, “Here’s what I just heard and here’s what the law says, and if I have to decide this, this is how I’m going to harm everyone in that room. You guys, what you might be able to think about doing that would be better.”
“What I just heard, I only have one road to go down because I’m a judge. I have these guardrails around my ability to do something better than what I’m stuck with based on the evidence I’ve heard so far. I’ve only heard half the case, but I’m just terrified that this is going to be incredibly harmful. Maybe you guys can put your heads together and come up with something better.”
I think both the humility in your doing that and for lawyers to own that it may take more of their work to do the thinking that you’re requesting than to defer to the law and your judgment on that is really powerful and for litigants to hear or to understand that the judge is giving them another opportunity to be creative, to think for themselves, to think outside the box, to have that the grace of that opportunity I think is huge.
When people may feel disinclined to take it because they’ve been told or instructed that they might have an advantage or it might go their way more favorably or they’ve been posturing for a certain outcome and then you’re in that position and you’re hearing the person who has the power say to you, but you might want to rethink this. I think that’s incredibly powerful in that forum.
There are just times where the law says this has to be the result. Every once in a while, a lawyer would say, “Judge, you’re going to hear this evidence or this testimony,” and I would say, “Okay, you’re right. I haven’t heard the whole thing,” but I would just make sure that they were clear that if I didn’t find credible that which they wanted to present to me that was going to change my mind, the harm that was going to come to the family, it was all I could do. I just always struggled in those situations. Often, what was so cool is that they did come up with something much better.
I think that, at least in my experience, for a lot of people, the law is confounding and it becomes this obscured process. The lack of transparency about what a judge can and can’t do becomes unclear. People become fixated on an idea of what they think a just outcome would be or what they’ve been advised they might get and all these things come and it’s very difficult when you’re in an agitated state emotionally to have your logical brain engaged enough in a process that recognizes what I’m being told is that this outcome might not be possible, that the judge has limited resources or ability to make a judgment.
I think that’s a really just a testament to how you handled your courtroom, but also I think a process that, in and of itself, can be really confusing to people going through it. At least in our work at the Consilium Institute, we’re so trying to give credence to all of what you’re saying and what families bring to the fore and how children need to be heard in and respected even though they’re don’t have the experience and other advantages of adults. They still have feelings that need to be acknowledged and appropriately given credence.
How Licensed Legal Paraprofessionals Help Families Tackle Legal Matters
Angie, I know you and I both had lots of self-represented litigants in our courtroom that we felt like, at least I felt like I needed to educate them enough about the law so that they could give me the information that I needed. I know obviously, judicial education is one of your great passions, but the other passion I think is making sure that people have resources so that they can go into court and have that ability to share their information in a in a thoughtful, complete way with the court.
I’d like to turn a little bit and talk about all the great work that you’ve been doing over the past several years on the License Legal Para-Professional Committee and what that looks like and where that came from. That’s a new concept here in Colorado, it’s a new concept in most states, but just tell us a little bit about that and what it is and what the goal of it is and where it came from. We might interrupt you with questions because it is such an interesting innovation.
In 2015, Washington State came up with these para-professionals called lllts, limited license legal technicians. They were the first in the country and these lllts practiced family law. That was the only area that they were licensed to practice in. It was innovative and Colorado heard about it and the bar association formed a committee that was 50-plus people. It was ridiculous because everybody was terrified. “This is going to take over our profession and ruin lawyers and law.”
Very shortly after, the concept was originally proposed in Colorado, the bar said, “No. We don’t want these people in Colorado. Absolutely not.” There were some access to justice-focused folks and some other some judges, a guy named Dave Stark who is the chair of the Supreme Court Advisory Committee. They kept working on the concept of having para-professionals assist people in smaller less complicated matters. In 2019, they made a proposal to the Supreme Court in Colorado to have para-professionals assist people in the landlord-tenant area with evictions. The Supreme Court thought about it and they came back and they said, “We know these people need help.”
However, the people who need the most help right now in Colorado are litigants in domestic relations cases. More than 70%, I think at that time it was about 74%, of litigants in domestic relations cases were going self-represented. The Supreme Court said, “It’s a great concept, but where it’s really needed, the screaming need right now is in family court.”
A lot of that was related to the fact that people weren’t problem solving very well without any legal advice. In fact, the forms and the process itself were so daunting for the public that many people would just separate and not deal with their divorce for years because it was so complicated to try and get a divorce.
Colorado had hired what we call Sherlock’s, which are individuals who are in the courthouse giving out legal information and helping people figure out the forms and things like that, but those folks were completely overwhelmed. Years before, we had these family court facilitators who would meet with people for their initial status conference but they didn’t have time to work with the people individually, and of course, none of those folks could give people legal advice.
In January of 2020, I received an email from a justice on the Colorado Supreme Court, Melissa Hart, and she said, “We’re thinking about creating a para-profession in Colorado, and we don’t know your position on it, but we thought you might be interested. If you’re not interested or if you’re against the idea, can you give us the names of people who might be interested?” Justice Hart is this incredibly thoughtful person who became a Supreme Court Justice because she would like to make change. That’s who she is, and she’s very interested in thoughtful ways to move the legal profession forward for the good of everyone.
I thought to myself when a Supreme Court Justice sends you this an email, you say, “Of course I’m interested and I’d love to help.” I became a co-chair with a woman named Maha Kamal, who’s an attorney who did unbundled legal services and who I knew from appearing in front of me down in Douglas County, and the two of us became the co-chairs. Jessica Yates, who is the Supreme Court Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel, who recognized that this would create tons more work for her office, still supported strongly the idea that a para-professional could be very helpful to family litigants in Colorado.
We started meeting in March of 2020 virtually. I was virtual and everyone else was in person but after the first meeting, we were all in in Zoom and we’ve been pretty much in Zoom since then. It took four years. In the meantime, we are blessed with a Supreme Court who is filled with folks who sat on the domestic relations bench. I think it’s fair to say that 3 of the 4 judicial officers, they were district court judges before they were Supreme Court Justices, were mentees of mine when they were in domestic relations.
In November of 2022 when we had our hearing in front of the Supreme Court, they’ve been unanimously in favor of this since the beginning. Literally it was three justices who said to us, “Why can’t they do more? Why can’t these licensed legal para-professionals help people more? Why do we have these limits on their practice that may constrict them from being more helpful to people to get them through the process?”
Of course, one of them, Justice Berkenkotter, was committed to the perspective that llps, licensed legal para-professionals, which was the name we came up with for them, would help people settle. Beca sometimes, just the smallest bit of legal advice, understanding what you have the right to ask for and understanding what you can walk away from and give up, but really understanding how that impacts you and the choices that you’re making and the realities financially and in terms of how it might impact your child to fight for this or that parenting plan or this or that child support. Those little things can be really impactful for people to understand how to find their own solutions.
Sometimes, the smallest bit of legal advice can be impactful for people to understand how to find their own solutions. Share on XCan I ask you a question? Just in terms of the training of the llps and people’s reliance on their advice.
The minimum to be a licensed legal para-professional is to have a paralegal degree or a Bachelor’s with 15 hours of paralegal studies or a law degree from another country that wouldn’t give you the right to a bar license in Colorado. You have to have had some legal related training and that’s what we call Path A, plus 1,500 hours of actual paralegal experience or law related practice experience I think is the term that we use, and 500 of those hours have to have been Colorado family law practice hours.
The term isn’t specifically defined in the rule, but the committee defines that as actual interaction with clients and helping people in their actual cases. Being a law clerk for a judge or being a researcher for a professor who’s a family law professor, those kinds of things do not qualify you to do this. When you get licensed, you will be engaging in the practice of law and you can be independent. You can have your own practice.
You’ll be licensed to practice law in this limited way, and presumably there are malpractice providers who are assuming this liability potentially. You’re not a lawyer, but you’re a para-professional with exactly what it says. Limited legal abilities giving legal advice. I could imagine that the bar was not happy about this.
I think that the idea is that there are so many people who would never go to a lawyer, couldn’t afford a lawyer, couldn’t take advantage of all of the advice that they might get if they went. This is like giving them more than they would otherwise have in for cases that aren’t so complex that they would require the next level of legal thinking or case analysis or things that would be have a higher need in terms of legal skill. Is that correct?
Absolutely. If you want the easiest analogy for most people to understand, you’re out in the hinterlands of Colorado and there’s no doctor. Um. People aren’t getting healthcare where they are. A nurse practitioner or a PA moves to that area. Now instead of no healthcare, they’re getting some healthcare. In fact, they’re getting some pretty high-quality healthcare, but it’s not complete. Before, they had nothing. This is nothing versus something. This is not LLP versus lawyer because these people weren’t hiring lawyers and they never would.
Both because they couldn’t afford it and there were a lot of people who could afford lawyers but didn’t want to spend the $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 or more to litigate their divorce. They would go it alone but badly. Having this nurse practitioner can really help you identify what the challenges are in your dissolution in your family system and move forward from there and get enough advice, if it’s not a complex situation. Complex is defined pretty much as trusts, marital agreements, jurisdictional conflicts, litigating really tough stuff. Experts required to value property or value an income stream.
Wage earners, folks who are self-employed but not high earners, the general folks who couldn’t afford any legal assistance and Colorado has had unbundled legal services since, I think, 2001. That being said, there are an awful lot of lawyers who don’t provide it. There are an awful lot of litigants who don’t understand what it is and they certainly don’t take advantage of it even when it’s available to them.
There are plenty of folks who really can’t get through the process without that hands-on assistance. Llps can actually go to court with people. They can sit with them at counsel table, they can make an opening statement, they can make a closing argument, they can’t question witnesses, but they can help the person feel comfortable enough and they can answer the judge’s questions, explain what the judge just said to the party.
It’s just a level of assistance that we’re trying to keep people out of court. Even when they have to go to court, at least they’re not there all by themselves and for the judges. They don’t have to figure it out. They don’t have to ask 30 questions to try and understand what the equities are just in order to do equity.
Families do not have to go to court all by themselves. With proper legal assistance, they will not ask the judge 30 questions just to do equity. Share on XAre they drafting agreements or not?
Yes, but primarily by using the forms.
Are there defined jurisdictional limits? You talked about some of the things like if it’s overly complex.
No, not jurisdictional conflicts. Any jurisdictional conflicts, they have to refer the person to an attorney or just stay in the case but not handle that piece of it.
If there’s a trust, if that has some impact. If there’s since height, a marital agreement that needs to be litigated. As I said, if you have to hire an expert to value assets. Now, of course, I’m guessing it’s true in most places, but in Colorado, if you own your house, you can opine as to its value. If you had an appraisal beforehand, you can opine as to your house’s value based on that appraisal and it’s not inappropriate for you to do that.
If that case isn’t settled, you can go into the courtroom with your LLP and just get on the witness stand and testify as to the value of your car and the value of your house and basic stuff. They can’t draft qualified domestic relations orders, they can’t draft documents that transfer businesses. They can do parentage determinations but not with multiple parents. If they’re more than two possible parents of a child, they are not able to do that.
How many applicants have there been for your program?
Over 70 people have qualified to take the exam.
The exam is being given when?
April 30th, 2026. It is six hours. Everybody has to take an ethics class like you do in law school because legal ethics are complex, so the Supreme Court decided that they wanted everybody to take a legal ethics class. That was developed. We had input into it, we didn’t develop it but the Community College of Denver is piloting the ethics class. There’s also an advanced family law class that’s optional, but recommended. There is a nineteen-page document that a bunch of judges put together. We spent hours and hours and it is called the core competencies, and that is the list of all the things that people need to know in order to engage in the limited practice of law.
It would be helpful for lawyers, wouldn’t it?
Llps will probably know more than baby lawyers who start practicing DR, for sure.
What’s the citation to the Colorado rule?
It is Colorado Rule of Civil Procedure 207.
Why do you think this is a game changer? I think you’ve talked about it a little bit, but why do you think this is a game changer in Colorado?
If you look at it from the perspective of the bench, unfortunately, what sometimes happens is that people who are brand new to being a judge are thrown into family court because it’s easy. They go into a courtroom with more discretion than in any other discipline, and they have no background or experience in family law and there’s no lawyers.
There’s just two individuals who have no idea what the court needs to know and what they need to share and what their rights are, all of these things. It’s an unmitigated disaster for the court in that situation. An LLP can help the court at least understand what the issues are and what might be important to ask about, if nothing else.
You could say that an LLP would be providing the court with significant information about what the issues are and how to assist these people in moving forward. That’s from the court perspective. We’re hoping that those cases, most of them don’t get to court because people will have the assistance to fill out the forms, to understand how to negotiate a parenting plan and what the parenting plan actually means and attend mediation and negotiate the financial stuff.
If there’s financial stuff to negotiate, understanding the maintenance guidelines which are very complex in Colorado, just all sorts of things. We’re really hoping that a handful at least, if not the majority, of llps will do unbundled services. They are expected, just like lawyers in Colorado, not required but expected to do pro bono. Just like lawyers, they have a CLE requirement. We’re hopeful that they become staples in the family law community and that lots and lots of the public learn about them and rely on them for assistance in like 70% to 80% of divorces that are relatively simple and straightforward.
How Families Can Take Advantage Of An LLP’s Assistance
I guess my last question, Angie just on, the llps is do you know yet how people plan to use it? Are they going to be within a law firm? Like paralegals that are already in a or are there going to be Standalone or some combination? I guess maybe depending on the area.
Probably the former, especially in the Metro areas, more the former than the latter. There are a number of prominent family law firms who are actually supporting their paralegals through the process. The Harris Law Firm, Griffiths law. Just a number of prominent family law firms that have paralegals who have notified us that they’re signed up and interested.
They’re being supported through the process so the firms will have them as another option service to offer their clients. There are some folks who are looking at starting their own entity, their own LLP firm. It’s probably a little scarier. On the day after the llps are sworn in, we have a practicum that we’re doing for a full day at CLE of Colorado, Inc., that will be teaching llps. All the stuff they never did before, which is Interviewing clients, going through the decision making for discovery. Looking at preparing clients for mediation and appearing in court.
Paralegals have never done that. The practicum’s focus is to help them with tools to actually do what they are now licensed to do, which we haven’t had the opportunity to do before because there were no folks who were licensed, but I do anticipate there will be some. At that practicum, the first session in the morning is a LLLP from Washington, an LPP from Utah and then an LP from Arizona, all of whom have their own practice. The title is What I Wish I Knew. We all have something to teach each other.
How many other states have something similar?
My understanding is there are 25 states who are either in the process of licensing paraprofessionals, have licensed paraprofessionals or are looking at seriously going down the path of licensure. That’s pretty much from The Institute for the advancement of the American legal system, who is very engaged in monitoring what’s going on in this space? I would say the majority of the paraprofessionals in the United States right now in this space are practicing family law because that’s where the need is the greatest.
You must be excited.
Yeah, creating a legal profession. A lot of work. Who would have thought?
Get In Touch With Judge Angie
Angie, thank you for taking the time to talk with us. Thank you for your brilliant leadership in Colorado, and really nationally, in judicial education and in this endeavor, that is going to change the way that families experience court in Colorado, or don’t. Even better. I know that when people talk to me in mediation or in the community, the legal Community, everyone says, “Do you know Angie Arkin?” I always say, “Yes, she is one of my heroes, my Inspirations.”
I’m also honored to say a dear friend. Thank you for your leadership and passion for caring for families in Colorado. We’ve discussed featuring you with a national panel of experts, judges, to talk about judicial education and we are setting that up. We’ve got some folks who were recruiting and should have more information about that for everyone in the next month or so. Thank you so much.
I will be honored to join a group of folks who actually liked this work, crazy as we are.
You and me both, friend.
Important Links
About Angie Arkin
During her time on the bench, Judge Arkin handled mixed dockets involving criminal, civil, probate, mental health, juvenile, and domestic cases, while in her final 7 years she handled 100% domestic relations dockets.
She led the Colorado initiative to expand services for underrepresented litigants by championing the licensing of legal paraprofessionals, which allows specially trained paralegals to represent litigants in court in certain family law cases.
Judge Arkin is a frequent lecturer and author in the areas of family law, DNA evidence, unbundled legal services, and jurisdiction. In 2015, Judge Arkin was chosen as the Court Judge Honoree for the Colorado Judicial Excellence Award. Additionally, she has been recognized for her service to the domestic relations bench, bar, and Colorado families.
