When You Need Advice:
Case & Practice Consultation
You suddenly found yourself facing a new problem - one for which no one prepared you.
Whether a client whose needs seem too complex to disentangle, or a practice problem that leaves you wasting precious hours of your day, the issue seems to demand knowledge you don’t have or skills you haven’t mastered. It’s frustrating, and worse, it makes you doubt yourself.
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You may have already had the added frustration of asking for advice. You may have asked colleagues, or strangers in online groups… You got a wide variety of seemingly contradictory advice and suggestions, or worse, much commiseration but no real solutions.
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You can experiment with suggestions, but the stakes are high:
Wasting precious time and effort
Making the problem worse than it is
Creating unforeseen practice liability
Harming the client you tried to help
Instead, you could get individualized, confidential support:
Strategize around a particularly challenging client case or issue
Tackle a clinical practice problem, like inefficient documentation writing
Address nonprofit growing pains, from policy to staff development
Areas of Expertise: Consultation for Legal Professionals
Mental Health and Trauma in Family Courts and Child Welfare Cases
Adults with complex mental health needs and/or trauma histories can require unique services and support to properly navigate family court cases (e.g., custody, contentious divorce) and often may not have adequate service access to prevent child welfare system involvement. Likewise, children with similar needs often require specialized care, which can affect choices around custody arrangements. From addressing expert selection issues to developing a strong understanding of the diagnostic and documentary issues in such cases, attorneys can often benefit from consultation support.
Identifying and Navigating Emotional or Behavioral Issues in Adopted Youth
You may be surprised to learn that adoptees from child welfare systems (as well as international adoptees) often experience a host of unique behavioral and emotional struggles that may affect their functioning in multiple domains. From school advocacy, to juvenile Court involvement, these background characteristics can pose unique challenges for working with youths, as well as require unique placement considerations and support services.
Harm Reduction and Transition to Community for Adults with Disabilities
Our criminal legal system often fails adults with mental health, substance use, and related disabilities. This is particularly true when people with disabilities are transitioning out of institutional settings (even after a short time). Harm reduction approaches can be used as an alternative to abstinence-only substance abuse requirements, and can also be helpful for individuals engaging in self-harm, or struggling with other self-abusive behavior. Likewise, unique considerations for return to community apply when clients have a complex set of behavioral and health-related needs. From helping attorneys understand their clients' needs and options, to guiding counsel in supporting client success in diversion, specialty Court, or conditional release from custody, topics of consultation can inform options that hadn't been considered and improve the outcomes for these cases.
Areas of Expertise: Consultation for Clinicians & Administrators
Documentation Practice Improvement
Clinicians are almost never taught how to properly document services. That means you might be spending hours writing each note (in long narrative form!) or writing assessments that are so bare bones, they put your entire practice at risk by increasing liability risk or claw-back potential. You may also be resorting to problematic practices: using Generative AI to write your documentation, copying and pasting the same treatment plan interventions over and over again, or maintaining multiple sets of records for each client... There's a better way. You can learn to write efficiently, quickly, and accurately, based on a solid understanding of the ways in which medical necessity criteria are applied to your modality, theoretical orientation, and client population. As part of consultation services, you can develop your own skill set, or set up your practice for success, with customized training and informal auditing.
Nonprofit Policy Development
Got a nonprofit organization? Your policies and procedures can make or break the organization: the wrong policies can worsen staff turnover, lower the quality of service, or even get in the way of your organization's ability to achieve its worthwhile mission. Could you benefit from help from someone with experience in nonprofit service, leadership and grant writing, and government agency policy development? Consultation services can be used to audit your policies or help you shape new policy approaches to ensure high-quality service and strong staff satisfaction.
Clinical Case Consultation - Meeting Clients' Complex Needs
Got a client whose needs you are struggling to meet? Or, a client who seems stuck, making very little progress despite good engagement and attendance? When you feel like what you're doing isn't working, and you don't know what else to try, a case consultation can help bring a new perspective, new ideas, or raise questions you may not have considered. This is particularly true when a client is at higher risk, or has a multitude of competing needs for care and support. You can discuss a single case, or help your team create a structure for ongoing peer consultation by inviting your team to a group consultation session.
