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What Attorneys Need to Know Before Cross-Examining a Custody Evaluator

January 15, 2025 | By Dr. Kristin M. Tolbert, Psy.D.

Custody evaluators carry significant weight in family court. Judges rely on their reports, their credentials, and their testimony. That influence is only appropriate when the evaluation was done correctly. When it was not, the evaluator's credibility is the whole game.

Cross-examining a custody evaluator effectively requires more than general deposition skills. You need to know what the standards actually require, where the evaluator's methodology fell short, and how to expose those gaps in a way that lands with a judge who has seen a hundred of these reports.

Here is what matters most going in.

Know the standards before you walk in.

Custody evaluators are bound by the APA Guidelines for Child Custody Evaluations (2022), the AFCC Model Standards of Practice for Child Custody Evaluation (2006), and the APA Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (2017). Most evaluators reference these documents in their reports. Few are prepared to defend their methodology against them line by line.

If the evaluator used an outdated test instrument, failed to assess all children directly, or reached conclusions that are not supported by the data in the report, those are not matters of professional judgment. They are departures from specific, documented standards.

The report is a summary, not the file.

A custody evaluation generates substantial underlying material: test protocols, scoring sheets, session notes, interview documentation, collateral contact records. The final report summarizes all of that. If an evaluator claims the report is the complete file, that claim itself is a problem worth exploring on the record.

Subpoena the underlying data early. What the evaluator is willing to produce, and what they resist producing, tells you something. What is missing tells you more.

Look for differential treatment before you look for anything else.

Bias in a custody evaluation rarely announces itself. It shows up in patterns. Did the evaluator characterize identical behaviors differently depending on which parent engaged in them? Were one parent's concerns treated as credible documentation while the other's were described as a campaign or an obsession? Were the psychological test results for both parents interpreted through the same lens?

These patterns are often more persuasive to a court than any single piece of contradictory evidence. They show a consistent direction, not an isolated mistake.

Prepare for the evaluator to lean on clinical judgment.

When pressed on methodology, evaluators frequently retreat to clinical judgment as a defense. The response to that is specific: clinical judgment is not a substitute for required methodology. The APA Guidelines and AFCC Standards exist precisely because individual judgment, without structural requirements, is not sufficient in a forensic context. An evaluator who cannot explain how their conclusions follow from their data is an evaluator with a problem.

Consider having the evaluation reviewed before the deposition.

An attorney who walks into an evaluator's deposition without a systematic analysis of the report's methodology is working at a disadvantage. A thorough pre-deposition review identifies the specific standards that were not met, the internal contradictions in the report, and the questions most likely to produce useful answers on the record.

The goal is not to destroy the evaluator. It is to establish, question by question, that the court cannot rely on this report to make a decision about these children.

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