New Jersey Rewrote Its Custody Law in January. Five Other States Already Had.
New Jersey's child custody statute, N.J.S.A. 9:2-4, changed on January 20, 2026. The amendment removed the old presumption favoring frequent and continuing contact with both parents, made a child's safety the threshold issue a court must address before anything else, and barred judges from ordering reunification therapy that relies on force, coercion, or isolating a child from the parent they're currently bonded to. Judges must now put the factual basis for a contested custody decision in writing. New Jersey is not the first state to do this, and it will not be the last.
This started as a federal incentive, not a New Jersey idea
The framework behind New Jersey's rewrite is Kayden's Law, formally the Keeping Children Safe from Family Violence Act, signed into the 2022 Violence Against Women Act reauthorization. It does not force states to do anything directly; it conditions a slice of federal STOP Grant funding on states adopting reforms that restrict unproven reunification programs, tighten expert-witness standards in abuse cases, and require judicial training on coercive control. States have been taking the deal piecemeal since 2023: California's Piqui's Law, then reforms in Colorado, Maryland, Tennessee, and Utah, then Texas's HB 3783 in 2025, and now New Jersey's N.J.S.A. 9:2-4 overhaul. Each state writes its own version, but the shape repeats: safety screening first, documented findings, and limits on how reunification therapy can be ordered.
The part that lands on a firm's desk
A statute that tells a judge to write detailed findings doesn't just change what the judge does. It changes what the attorney has to put in front of the judge. Under New Jersey's version, a contested case now needs a record that actually supports a written safety determination: documented abuse or domestic violence history, which parent raised it and when, whether any reunification program involved has the licensing and evidence base the new law requires, and the child's stated preference where it's relevant. None of that is new information a firm didn't have before. What's new is that it has to be assembled and presented in a form a judge can cite in a written order, instead of sitting loose across intake notes, old emails, and a parent's recollection from eighteen months ago.
Why this is a bigger problem for small firms than big ones
A firm with a dedicated custody-evaluation team builds this into its case-prep checklist once and runs it on every file. A two- or three-attorney family law practice doesn't have a standing team to do that, and the firms most exposed are the ones carrying older case files opened before any of this reform wave started, where the domestic-violence history was mentioned once in an intake call and never flagged again. If your state hasn't passed a Kayden's Law-style reform yet, five states already have in the last three years, and a sixth just did. The question isn't whether your intake process needs this; it's whether you build it before your state's version takes effect or after a judge sends a case back for lacking the findings the new statute requires.
Where this fits an agent, not a rewrite of your intake form
This is a sorting-and-drafting problem, not a legal-judgment problem. An agent that reads a case file against a jurisdiction's custody-reform checklist, flags where a required piece (abuse history, a reunification provider's credentials, a child's documented preference) is missing or stale, and drafts a short pre-hearing memo laying out what's on file and what isn't, saves an attorney from reconstructing that record under deadline pressure. The agent never decides what the custody outcome should be and never files anything; it does the reading and drafting, and the attorney reviews, edits, and signs off before anything goes near a courtroom. We build workflows like this into a firm's family law setup; the general pattern is on how it works.
Sources: Brach Eichler, "New Jersey's New Child Custody Law: What the Amendments to N.J.S.A. 9:2-4 Mean for You and Your Children", Divorce.law, "NJ Child Custody Law Overhaul: N.J.S.A. 9:2-4 Changes (Jan 2026)", and Wikipedia, "Kayden's Law".