Why it matters that the reports were court-ordered

A reader wrote to explain to me why my ex-wife is so eager to claim that certain previous reports were not court-ordered.

He has his own story, which I hope he will post someday. He says that he got sent to a court-ordered evaluator, and discovered that the evaluator had phony credentials and a fake web page. He is another angry dad.

He points out that if the evaluations were really scientific, then there were be some set of standards that the evaluators would have to follow. But there aren't. It is completely subjective. The evaluators are crooks, and they give whatever conclusions they are supposed to give, regardless of the facts.

He says that the evaluators always real all the previous reports. That is how they know what to say. They just regurgitate what has been said before. If the court wanted a more objective result, it could have separate evaluations done independently, and then compare the results. If the evaluations really had some evidenciary validity, then different evaluations should be likely to agree. But they don't, unless the outcome has been prearranged.

I have had eight evaluations done on me. They did not all say the same thing. My reader says that this is a problem for the next evaluator, because he won't know which of the eight to plagiarize.

That is why my ex-wife is so desperate to label the reports that she likes as "court-ordered", and to denigrate the other reports as not court-ordered. He says that the crooked evaluators will know that they are expected to back up the court-ordered reports, and ignore the others. That is what is going to keep them on the court gravy train, he says.

I am not sure if he is right or not, but I do know that I have called dozens of court evaluators, and they nearly always ask who did the previous evaluations. Apparently they want to know whose crooked evaluation will be expected to be upheld. I cannot think of any other explanation. If I sent a blood test to a lab, the lab does not ask if a previous lab has done the blood test.