TLC's mission is to improve case outcomes for abused and neglected children by enhancing the quality of legal services they receive, by raising public awareness, and by facilitating improvement in systems that serve children and families. The most important decisions about an abused or neglected child's future are made in court. TLC exists to help ensure that those decisions are the best possible for the child.
This Online Center is dedicated to all children who suffer at the hands of others. May these resources help protect those precious ones from further harm.
Texas Lawyers for Children (TLC) is a program of The Child Protection Connection®, a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit umbrella organization. TLC was founded in 1995 to provide specialized training about child abuse issues to Dallas judges and attorneys. Founder Barbara Elias-Perciful had been practicing business litigation at the Dallas law firm Carrington, Coleman, Sloman & Blumenthal, L.L.P., but was moved to action when she took a pro bono case to represent a 12-year old girl who had been sexually abused by her father for years. This little girl's case revealed the devastating deficiencies in the systems meant to protect abused and at-risk children, including a severe lack of tools, research, and expertise available for these children's pivotal cases. Compared to working at a business litigation firm, "It was like practicing law in a tent compared to practicing law in a castle," describes Barbara regarding the vast differences in the availability of funding and resources for attorneys representing abused children and those representing businesses and other types of paying clients.
In 2004 Texas Lawyers for Children created its Online Legal Resource and Communication Center ("TLC Online Center") to expand the accessibility of essential resources to attorneys and judges in the child protection field in Texas and to target court system improvement. In November 2007, the Texas Supreme Court's Permanent Judicial Commission for Children, Youth and Families selected the TLC Online Center program as one of its Texas Court Improvement Program projects for improving the court system's handling of child abuse cases. Since that time, TLC has used the innovative technology and capabilities of its Online Center to make a positive impact for vulnerable children, as seen by numerous awards and recognitions, and has now replicated similar online centers in four other states - California, Florida, Maryland, and Alabama.
TLC's Online Center now has the potential to serve one third of the U.S. child population. TLC continues to add new capabilities to the Online Center model and increase its capacity to build collaborative communities, enhance legal representation, improve judicial decision-making, and facilitate change in agency policy and legislation in each state and across the nation. This model continues to be the only resource of its kind, and we are proud of the work we have been able to do to serve the professionals whose work is pivotal in protecting abused and at-risk children.
Texas Lawyers for Children has received significant national, statewide, and regional awards: