Ellen Gay Niermann

Gay was hired as my divorce CFI. Not only did she not do as the judge asked her to determine extremely important and critical information during a nasty custody battle, she lied about her involvement, her due diligence as research and findings as well as charged a completely absurd amount of money f...or a few hours of actual work. Avoid her like the plague, unless you like wasting your time and money.

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.

I would not recommend her as a CFI to anybody !!!! When I went thru custody battle for my child, Gay did not asses fair judgment in my case. She believed somebody who lied and made it look all nice and peachy ( and who voluntarily at the end of the case settled for 1/3 of the time that she originall...y suggested) and wasted our time and money. It did take 3 months to complete the reports, which could be easily be done and filed within 30 day period. She needs to learn how determine who is a truly wants time with the child and who is just putting on a show.

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.