Last week I spent two days representing clients in probate court.  The other cases I observed there provided fodder for several future blog posts.  Some of these observations are useful, others are interesting, and some are just sad.

Remembering the saddest one still plucks my heartstrings.  The only person appearing before the judge was a court-appointed attorney.  I think she was the guardian ad litem, someone appointed to represent the interests of someone who can't speak for herself.  A guardian ad litem differs from a guardian because a guardian makes legal decisions about someone else's care and the guardian ad litem (or G.A.L.) advocates for someone else in court.  Yet a guardian ad litem isn't the same as legal counsel because the role of legal counsel is to work for what the client wants while the G.A.L. advocates for what he thinks the client would want if the client were rational and communicative.

This GAL appeared to be representing three children who had been placed in the care of a guardian. The guardian, possibly the children's aunt, was out-of-state and testifying by telephone.  The children, all of them girls, needed a guardian because their mother was on the run from the law, with no known address and other problems only vaguely mentioned.  As if that wasn't sad enough, the oldest of the children had started chemotherapy to treat a recent cancer diagnosis.  From what I could tell, this child wasn't older than ten or eleven years of age.  As we gradually clued into what was going on in the lives of these children my client and I couldn't stop the tears running down our face.  The guardian described the "challenges" faced by the children with only a minimal reference to her own challenges in raising 3 small girls that had recently come into her charge.  Things seemed relatively positive under the circumstances, but even the apparent resilience of these innocent souls brought me to tears. 

There's no moral to this story.  No legal lesson to be learned.  Just a renewed realization that there are some hard-working lawyers and judges in probate court who are trying to help others make the best of some bad situations.  I needed that reminder to help place some of my own annoyances in perspective.