Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Robert McBurney said the results of a survey circulated a few months ago aimed at gauging the legal community's assessment of the court's Family Division shows some improvements can be made but that there is broad support for maintaining the court as a separate division.

"It was very helpful; we had over 200 responses," said McBurney. "There was lots of good constructive criticism on ways to make it work better. But the majority view was, 'Please try to fix it; don't abolish it.'"

News of the online survey spurred alarm in some quarters after it was provided to members of the family law sections of the State Bar of Georgia and the Atlanta Bar Association at the request of the superior court bench. 

In May, a group of lawyers, ministers and a Fulton County Commission member released a statement expressing "strenuous opposition to the clandestine attempt by some lawyers and some judges" to "dismantle the Fulton Family Division and to revert to the practice of handling family law cases utilized years ago."

At the time, McBurney dismissed the outcry as an "alarmist" misinterpretation of an unremarkable effort to measure the court's effectiveness and get feedback from the bar.   

On Tuesday, McBurney said there were many suggestions in response to the survey.

"The most helpful recommendations were improving and streamlining the scheduling" of Family Court cases, he said.

"We're going to propose some rule changes to implement some of those suggestions," McBurney said. "I say 'propose' because the [Georgia] Supreme Court has to sign off on those rules."

The Supreme Court approved the Family Division as a pilot project in 1998. It now has four full-time judges hearing cases including divorce, child support, child custody and domestic violence.

McBurney said the actual survey responses would not be made public.

"Because the survey was anonymous, there was some frank feedback about individual performance, " he said. 

"But on the key question of do we try to fix it within the division or end it, the majority view was to fix it."