Attorney Richard Ducote has achieved a rare record of success in his 47 years of practicing law and advocating for battered women and abused children.

Always conscious of the importance of the relationship between social services and the legal profession, just six months after his admission to the Louisiana Bar he conceived, co-authored, and then directed a grant proposal submitted to the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect to improve the court handling of child protection and foster care cases in the Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, Juvenile Court where he had served as a probation officer.

The proposal was one of only four nationwide to be funded and created the Tulane University School of Law’s Juvenile Law Clinic.

The project jointly trained law and School of Social Work students to vigorously advocate, in teams, for dependent children.

In 1980, the then-U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare chose the project to showcase nationally as an example of innovative and successful initiatives.

While personally representing hundreds of abused children from 1978-1981, Ducote helped strengthen and unify the local and state foster parent associations to reform the foster care system through legislation and administrative advocacy.

Following the Louisiana legislature’s enactment of Ducote’s package of statutory changes – including three amendments to the termination-of-parental-rights provisions – the state’s secretary of Health and Human Resources remained frustrated that changes in the law alone were insufficient to move children from foster care to adoption.

His solution was to create a special post for Ducote to act, in essence, as the state’s termination of parental rights “czar” mandated to “do what needed to be done” to appropriately free kids for adoption.

Starting from scratch and often confronted with a skeptical cadre of caseworkers who had little faith that anything would change, since promises of new initiatives were routinely broken over the years … Ducote kept his word and exceeded all expectations.

Tirelessly, he traveled the state negotiating agreements with every prosecutor, compiling decision-making and referral packets, and conducting his motivational and training seminars for the social workers, lawyers, and mental health professionals involved in the cases.

At every session, he invited the workers to present their most troublesome cases, which he would then digest overnight while typing up termination-of-parental rights (TPR) court petitions to present to the pleasantly startled case managers for filing the next day.

In the 2 ½ years that he held that position, Ducote, himself a former foster parent and an adoptive parent, freed more than 750 foster children for adoption in contrast to the 10 freed in the previous five years.

He personally tried TPR cases in 40 Louisiana courts, served as a special assistant district attorney in 19 parishes (counties), and argued in every appellate court in the state.

Ducote’s reported decisions include: State in the Interest of A.E., 448 So.2d 183 (La.App.4thCir.1984); State in the Interest of D.L., 457 So.2d 141 (La.App.2ndCir.1984); State in the Interest of a Minor, 446 So.2d 1385 (La.App.3rdCir.1984); State in the Interest of Two Children, 477 So.2d 883 (La.App.4th Cir.1985); State in the Interest of a Minor Female Child, 470 So.2d 595 (La.App.1st Cir.1984) and State in the Interest of Hodges, 459 So.2d 634 (La.App.5th Cir.1984).

In 1984, Mr. Ducote began his nationwide practice representing victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence in custody, tort, and TPR cases.

His primary concentration has been in cases where courts have granted custody of children to child molesters and domestic violence perpetrators.

Ducote has been an ardent opponent of the bogus Parental Alienation Syndrome concocted by discredited child psychologist Richard Gardner and used to discredit victims of child sexual abuse and domestic violence.

This role has taken him to courts in 44 states, appearances on Donahue, Oprah, 60 Minutes, CNN, and Good Morning Britain, Leeza and interview quotes in Parade Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Money, and the National Law Journal.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune described him in a 1987 feature story as “raising hell for children in courtrooms all over the country.”

In 1988, Ducote won the then-largest jury verdict ever in Washington County, Maryland, history – a $1 million award to a four-year-old girl sexually abused by her father.

On his first attempt to take a case to the U.S. Supreme Court, he won a unanimous reversal of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Ankenbrandt v. Richards, 504 U.S. 689, 112 S.Ct. 2206 (1992).

In that decision, he obtained the right of abused children to sue their parents in federal court and eliminated the 100-year-old “domestic relations exception” to federal diversity jurisdiction.

In May 1998, Ducote won a $19 million verdict on behalf of a 19-year-old woman against her sexually abusive father in Arlington County, Virginia.

In April 1999, he won a $4.5 million judgment in Louisiana on behalf of a 19-year-old woman who had been molested by her father while she was ages 10-12. He has also represented many victims of clergy abuse in civil suits.

Ducote has authored articles for publications of the American Bar Association’s National Legal Resource Center for Child Advocacy and Protection, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and the Florida State Courts Legal Affairs and Education Division.

Many of the positions he advanced in his 1986 article, “Why States Don’t Terminate Parental Rights” in Justice for Children (Winter, 1986) have been included in the emerging consensus of foster care reform ideas.

That article was cited with approval in “Effective Permanency Planning for Children in Foster Care,” Social Work (May, 1990), and by the New Jersey Supreme Court in D.Y.F.S. v. A.W., 512 A.2d 43 (1986), as justification for one of the rare instances where an appellate court reversed a trial court’s refusal to terminate parental rights.

Ducote’s Post-Separation Family Violence Relief Act (R.S. 9:361-369), passed unanimously by the Louisiana legislature in 1992 and was widely praised by the National Center on Women and Family Law, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges Journal, and the Harvard Law Review.

Many states, as well as the nation of New Zealand, have enacted similar laws based on this legislation.

It prohibits sexual abusers and violent parents from obtaining custody of children, and sets up tight controls over visitation, while forcing the abusers to pay all costs and attorneys’ fees. He has won appeals under those statutes in Bruscato v. Avant, 660 So.2d 72 (La.App.4th Cir.1995) and Lewis v. Lewis, 771 So.2d 856 (La.App.2nd Cir. 2000).

In addition to serving as a clinical assistant professor of Psychiatry at the Louisiana State University Medical Center, Ducote has lectured across the country to foster care review boards, national and state child welfare conferences, and adoption advocacy organizations.

In June 1997, he addressed an international audience attending the Second World Congress on Family Law and the Rights of Children and Youth on child sexual abuse and custody cases at the invitation of the Domestic Violence Project of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and the Violence Against Women Office of the United States Department of Justice.

In October 1997, Ducote trained judges, advocates, and court administrators on complex interstate child custody situations involving various types of abuse. In 1998, he lectured at the annual conference of the National Association of Forensic Social Workers and trained federal and tribal judges on sexual abuse issues in South Dakota.

Ducote also trained judges and attorneys in Denver, attending the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence conference. In April 1999, he trained lawyers and other professionals for the Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence on complex custody cases involving violence and sexual abuse.

In March 1999, after Ducote successfully defended a woman criminally prosecuted in Pennsylvania for “kidnapping” her sexually abused child to protect him from the child’s father, as he has done in other states, the trial judge took the unusual step of telling the jury that they had witnessed the finest example of a trial and lawyering he had ever seen, and that law schools would have been wise to take the week off for students to observe the proceedings.

Ducote has been honored by the Louisiana Foster Parent Association and the Baton Rouge Battered Women’s Program for his work.

In 1989, he was named Citizen of the Year by both the Louisiana and New Orleans Chapters of the National Association of Social Workers. In March, 1998, he was invited by Florida Governor Lawton Chiles to be the keynote speaker at the Governor’s Peace at Home Awards, which recognize successful domestic violence prevention initiatives.

Ducote was awarded the American Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division’s Child Advocacy National Certificate of Recognition for “significant legal contributions advancing the welfare of our nation’s children” in 1997.

In 1999, Ducote was appointed to a task force created by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and the U.S. Department of Justice to find solutions to the problem of abusers winning custody in family courts.

In September 2000, 2001, and 2002, he taught at the International Domestic Violence Conference in San Diego on Parental Alienation Syndrome and participated in a highly rated mock trial.

In October 2000, Ducote was an invited presenter at the American Bar Association’s Section on Family Law’s Fall CLE Conference, where he lectured on PAS and high-conflict custody cases. In July 2001, he trained judges, attorneys, and court evaluators in Oakland County, Michigan.

In October 2001, he trained lawyers and lay advocates in Savannah, Georgia, at the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence’s seminar, Advocating for Battered Women & Children in Custody, Visitation & Child Protection.

His workshops included: “Handling Expert Witnesses in Custody Cases”, “Federal Laws on Jurisdiction”, “Ethical Representation in Domestic Violence & Child Sexual Abuse Cases”, and “Evidentiary Issues: Child Witnesses, Working with Guardians and Evaluators.”

In October, 2001, Ducote was an invited trainer by the American Bar Association’s Commission on Domestic Violence for their Domestic Violence Civil Law Institute: Raising the Standard of Practice-Justice in Civil Courts for Domestic Violence Victims.

His presentations there included: “Guardians ad Litem in Domestic Violence Custody Cases” and “Cross Examination of an Abuser in Divorce/Custody Cases; Cross-Examination of Opposing Party’s Expert Witness.”

Ducote was also the featured luncheon speaker. In 2002, he began training psychologists and other California court-appointed mental health professionals as part of a mandated accreditation program established by the California Judicial Council.

In August, 2000, he was presented a special ceremonial eagle blanket by the Northern Plains Tribal Institute in South Dakota for his participation in the training of over 350 Indian tribal and federal judges from over 90 different tribes on child sexual abuse issues.

In January 2001, he was honored by the national child advocacy organization Justice for Children for “Pro Bono Service With Sincere Appreciation for [His] Commitment to the Abused Children of Our Nation.”

On May 10, 2001, he received the Louisiana State University School of Social Work Alumni Recognition Award for his contributions to the prevention of family violence through the legal system.

He has served on the boards of the Jefferson Children’s Council, Schools Combating Abuse and Neglect, and the Region VI Adoption Resource Center.

In June 2002, Ducote published his widely acclaimed article, Guardians ad Litem in Private Custody Litigation: The Case for Abolition, 3 Loyola Journal of Public Interest Law 116 (Summer 2002).

(Richard, please continue this narrative through 2025)