When should you hire an attorney for your adoption process?

International Adoption

It is not necessary to hire an attorney until you have decided on the international adoption professional who will arrange your adoption. With international adoptions, attorneys are not typically needed until the very end of the adoption process. In some cases, there is not a need for an attorney in your state. Your adoption professional should help assess your particular needs and assist you with whatever services will be needed.

Domestic Adoption

As with international adoptions, it is best to wait to hire an attorney until you have selected a domestic adoption professional. Depending on your adoption professional, you may or may not need to hire an attorney. Some agencies, such as American Adoptions, include legal services in their fee structure, while others require the adoptive family to find and hire thier own attorney. If you adopt a child from another state, you may not need an attorney in your state because the adoption may finalize in the birth mother’s state. Assume, for example, that you live in New Jersey and your adoption agency matches you with a birth mother in Missouri. Missouri does not allow for jurisdiction to be released to any other state and therefore all legal proceedings will occur in Missouri. This means a New Jersey attorney will not be utilized in any way for the adoption proceedings. If you had already retained a New Jersey attorney, you would simply have forfeited that money.

Exceptions to the above

Exceptions to the above advice would occur if you want an attorney to help you select an adoption professional and provide legal advice about the adoption process. If you do this, it is crucial to ensure that they specialize in adoption law and know all available resources. In other words, is their motive simply to encourage you to join their practice or is it to truly help you decide which adoption professional is best for you?

Another exception will occur if you locate your own birth mother and need to hire your own attorney to represent your interests and help finalize the adoption. You may even need to retain a separate attorney to represent the birth parents interests and assist with their part of the process.

If you simply want an attorney to provide an extra layer of protection for you, it is important to understand that should you adopt out of state, your attorney will not be qualified to practice in that state and therefore their advice will be limited.