Ellen Gay Niermann

Ms. Niermann did a wonderful job as a CFI in a case I know quite well. She went out of her way to let an absent father work to regain a relationship with his children. He had voluntarily removed himself from their lives for over two years for no good reason. Ms. Niermann worked hard to give the da...d a chance, but he chose not to work to regain a relationship with the kids. Despite his failure to act, she made recommendations for him and the children to try to address the relationship in counseling. She kept an open mind, and kept the children's best interests in mind. Sometimes a parent makes bad decisions, and then, when the bad decisions are pointed out and action is taken to protect the children, the bad-actor lashes out at the professional pointing out the bad decisions. I found Ms. Niermann to be an excellent CFI, and would highly recommend her to anyone in need of a child-focused, but fair CFI.

Gay Niermann was our PCDM for 2 years. During those two years, she made decisions that put the emotional and phyical well-being of a child at risk. She does not make decisions based on a child's best interest and ignores concerns, refusing to investigate prior to making a decision. She never met t...he child for whom she was making decisions. She does not seem to have a firm grasp on family law. I would never recommend her in any family law setting whether CFI work or PCDM. She is lazy, always on vacation and never fully engaged in her work in order to protect children. In one instance, she made a decision in which she was supposed to follow up with the Courts within 20 day and did not. I would strongly encourage you to find another CFI/PCDM.

Gay claimed to be an expert in parental alienation syndrome. This could not be further from the truth. She not only was ineffective, but when new PAS literature and research was published, she refused to read it claiming " she already knew everything about PAS". She failed to enforce my parenting ...time with my children. She continued to decrease my parenting time until it was entirely eliminated, despite being a loving, supportive and fully capable parent. The result is alarming. I have not spent time with my son for 7.5 years. I have spent only 10 hours with my daughter in the last five years. Who knows if and when we will ever be reunited as a family.

We tried to go into the family investigation process with an open mind and thought of it as a fair way to resolve the dispute we were having over shared parenting time. Gay took a shocking six months to complete her report, which was completely biased in the mother's favor and full of discrepencies. ...We asked for more time with more stability for the children. Her recommendation was for a much more irregular schedule completely in the mother's favor. There is nothing going on in our home to suggest that there should be less time given and after what had seemed to be a positive visit, we were surprised to read her report which had a completely negative slant. It honestly seemed that since it had taken her so long to visit the mother and then write the report that she had forgotten who we even were and what we had to offer the kids and just wrote the same biased recommendation she gives everyone. On top of this she was unprofessional by being repeatedly late, did not return phone calls, and just generally disorganized. If you are a father, find a different investigator who will actually consider that you might have something positive to offer your children.

Gay provided a completely biased report in my case. After minimal interaction with both parties (1 hr. per side and some 10 min phone calls) she came to very inaccurate conclusions and made unfounded recommendations to the court. It the position she is in when children are involved I believe the impo...rtance of ethics and doing due diligence is paramount. The communication was none existent and emails sent were not taken into account or even viewed. The report itself seemed very rushed with many misspellings and grammatical errors which to me say she didn’t even review it before submitting it to the court. Talking with witnesses whose testimony was cited in the report said the conversations they had with Gay were not portrayed accurately. Selective statements were used in the report to support an opinion she obviously had prior to submitting to the court. She is not qualified to make these kind of judgments.