Transparency is one way to curb the abuses involved in judges’ appointments of amicus attorneys, discovery masters and mediators. However, I cannot tell you easily who, for example, Judge Pratt is appointing in private cases and how much those appointees are being paid because almost no one is following a Supreme Court order that requires reporting of all appointees’ fees. The prior edition of The Mongoose quoted the 1997 Supreme Court order that requires all fees for judicial appointments to be approved in a separate order. The District Clerk is required to collect data from all such orders and report the fees in a monthly report to the state Office of Court Administration.
Click here to see the state-wide report. However, the spreadsheet is too big and covers the entire state. I have taken the period September 2012 through June 2013 and created spreadsheets for each of Harris County’s family district courts and sorted by bar number, so you can see who is getting reported appointment fees.
The last Mongoose analyzed Judge Pratt’s reported appointments. This issue analyzes the appointments of three more family district courts and I will publish numbers for the other courts in my next issue.
These reports on appointment fees, however, mostly only show fees paid by the county (such as CPS cases) and almost ALL of the lucrative amicus appointments in private cases and most appointed mediations are not being reported. As we all know, one lucrative child custody case can yield a fee for an amicus attorney equal to the fees paid by the county in a hundred CPS cases.
A review of the reported fees in the courts of Judges Dean, Lombardino and Moore show the following:
Judge Lombardino during this nine month period approved the following fees for the top seven highest paid judicial appointees in his court (click here to see the appointment fee report for the 308th District Court – almost all of which was for CPS cases except for Mr. Woodfill’s large private amicus cases that were reported):
| Jared Woodfill | $77,029.70 (included several private cases) |
| Lacey West | $31,225.00 |
| Bobbie Young | $24,100.00 |
| Susan Solis | $19,350.00 |
| Theodore Trigg | $18,175.00 |
| Angela Phea | $16,425.00 |
| George Clevenger | $14,770.00 |
Judge Sheri Y. Dean during this same nine month period approved the following fees for the top five highest paid judicial appointees in her court (click here to see the appointment fee report for the 309th District Court – almost all of which was for CPS cases):
| Susan Solis | $54,175.00 |
| Claudia Canales | $48,691.50 |
| Laura Arteaga | $45,725.00 |
| Bobbie Young | $30,737.00 |
| Chung Yuan Lee | $11,024.00 |
Judge Roy Moore in the nine month period approved the following fees for the eight highest paid judicial appointees in his court (click here to see the appointment report for the 245th District Court – almost all of which was for CPS cases except for Bavousett’s mediations):
| Bobbie Young | $46,125.00 |
| Steve Bavousett | $25,400.00 (all mediations) |
| Patrick Upton | $18,550.00 |
| Ronnie Harrison | $15,339.25 |
| Eric McFerren | $14,850.00 |
| Donna Everson | $12,675.00 |
| Claudia Canales | $12,125.00 |
| George Clevenger | $11,375.00 |
In all of the family courts, the fees for amicus attorneys and most court appointed mediators in private cases are not being reported. None of the very large fees for court appointed custody evaluators, accountants, special masters and receivers are being reported. All of that violates the Supreme Court order and deprives all of us from knowing who is getting a lot of money in particular courts. We have all seen the Supreme Court’s Court Appointment and Fees Report that many mediators file with the clerk after mediations. It would be a simple matter for each court or the local rules to require these forms to be filed by every amicus, ad litem, mediator, receiver, custody evaluator and special master and then the clerks could easily spot the fees to report.