KCBA’s Community Legal Services recognizes Erica Horton as November’s Volunteer of the Month for her work with the Kinship Care Solutions Project.
The Kinship Care Solutions Project represents low-income petitioners in non-parental custody actions where relatives and others seek legal custody of a child who is not their own. Often, these are relatives such as grandparents, aunts/uncles or adult siblings who are caring for the child due to abuse, neglect or abandonment by the parent.
Horton received her law degree from Seattle University School of Law in 2005. During law school, she became interested in her area of practice — family law — while writing about meretricious relationships for her law review article. After graduation, she began assisting longtime family law practitioner Scott East. Horton also participated as a volunteer for the KCBA Family Law Mentor Program where she assisted low-income clients in dissolution cases.
Horton became interested in the Kinship Care Solutions Project to broaden her family law experience and assist a family in need. This year, Horton represented the grandparents of two young children in a non-parental custody action. The mother of the children had significant mental health and substance abuse issues and a history of exposing the children to severe domestic violence. In addition, the father also had a long criminal history. The grandparents filed their case pro se, but quickly encountered procedural hurdles and contesting parents.
With trial set just four months away, Horton volunteered for the case. Horton states, “I quickly found that the project attorney had thoroughly screened the clients to come up with an accurate summary of the issues involved and that she was committed to providing support throughout the case.”
Seeing the possibility of settling the case with the mother, Horton negotiated and crafted a residential schedule that gave custody to the grandparents, provided supervised visitation for the mother and outlined the services the mother needed to engage in to address the issues that placed the children at risk. Proceeding to trial against the father, Horton prevailed and obtained a non-parental custody decree and residential schedule, including an order prohibiting contact between the father and children until further court order.
Regarding her experience working with the Project, Horton states, “The case not only gave me courtroom experience and a chance to work on a case with multiple parties, including the third-party petitioners, each parent, CASA and the State of Washing-ton, but it showed me the difference a volunteer can make in the clients’ lives. Helping the clients through the case allowed them to concentrate on caring for the children who were the subjects of the case and relieved them of the stress of trying to navigate a legal system they knew little about.”
KCBA congratulates Erica Horton for being selected the Volunteer of the Month and extends its gratitude for her commitment to providing needed legal representation to those who otherwise could not afford it. For more information about the Kinship Care Solutions Project, contact Judy Lin, staff attorney, at 206-267-7023.
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