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Magistrate Mark Huberman looks forward to a busy retirement

RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter

Published: August 17, 2017

Mark A. Huberman, long time domestic relations and juvenile court magistrate, has retired from his position at the Mahoning County Domestic Relations court.

His retirement on June 30, however, only stood to kick-start the rest of his life, he said. “I went from having one job to having three,” he said. He is taking over as administrator for the Ohio Association of Magistrates and is now the executive director of the National Health Association (he is a lifelong vegan). He also is looking to open up his own mediation service “to various courts.”

Huberman’s boss of the last two decades said he will certainly miss him.

“Mark was my first full time magistrate,” said Domestic Relations Judge Beth Smith, for whom Huberman had worked as a full time magistrate for the past 20 years after coming over from juvenile court, where he had been a part-time magistrate for the previous 10 years.

Smith brought Huberman over when she was first elected, she said, because, “I always thought that he had been a good magistrate in juvenile court—very nice to litigants. [In his time in domestic relations] he did very well hearing and resolving issues, and helping and listening to people. He did a lot of good work in the magistrate’s association. He’s a good guy.”

But the real read on Huberman may be Judge Smith’s closing comment that “he is a really interesting person.”

Huberman is a native of Boardman, where he still resides, a 1969 graduate of Boardman High School. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was a theatre major, and his juris doctor from Ohio Northern University “because I was interested in politics and civil rights, and it seemed like a good way to make a living,” he said.

Coming back to the valley, Huberman began his general law practice with fellow ONU classmate James S. Gentile in 1976, a business relationship that lasted, with various office mates coming and going, for 20 years, until Huberman took his full time magistrate’s position.

One of his office mates over time was prosecutor Paul Gains, including the time when Gains was shot at, that one day so long ago.

From the beginning, Huberman said that he had an affinity for work with at-risk children.

“I started as a court-appointed lawyer for kids, like a lot of lawyers do,” he said. He said he found himself drawn to “throw-away” kids—often neglected and dependent children whose parents were never there for them.

“I became an advocate for these children—sort of an unofficial guardian,” said Hubermand.

In 1989, he was asked to become a court referee (a position now called magistrate). He continued in that position for 10 years, still engaged in general law practice.

Then Judge Smith came calling. Huberman was not sure that he wanted to leave the juvenile law area, or his office with Gentile, but a full time position was “an attractive opportunity.”

Huberman’s career has been marked by service to both the community and the profession.

A lifelong theatre “nerd,” Huberman is past president and board member of the Youngstown Playhouse, and has acted in community theatre for many years.

“I love musical theatre,” he said. He has also served the Boardman schools as a school board member and media consultant, running the school’s TV network and helping raise the status of the school system through the years.

He has also served on the board of the Ohev Tzedek Temple, the Good Food Co-op, the Youngstown Area Community Action Counsel, the Mahoning County Youth Services Grant Advisory Board, as well as having been a member of many other community action organizations.

Professionally Huberman has served in many local and state bar, court and organizational capacities, including, and particularly, with Northeast Ohio Legal Services (now Community Legal Aid) and the Ohio Supreme Court.

Over his long professional career, Huberman said that he takes the most satisfaction out of two special accomplishments.

The first led directly to his current position with the Ohio Association of Magistrates, an organization that did not exist when he was starting out in the field.

“I was a charter member of the association,” he said. At the time, there were about 250 magistrate/referees in Ohio, most of them part time.

Today, he said, there are over 600 members.

Over the years, Huberman has chaired and conducted CLEs for the organization, developed its website, helped put together conferences and “worked on rules. I authored some changes in the law.”

The second was his appointment to the Supreme Court Commission on the Rules of Practice and Procedure, a body for which he served as chair (the first magistrate ever so appointed) for the final three of his years appointment.

In his first year on the Commission, Huberman was responsible for the language of the 2012 amendments to Ohio Rule of Juvenile Procedure 3, which is concerned with whether a child can waive rights to an attorney.

He also became the co-author of the 2016 adoption of Ohio Rule of Civil Procedure 65.1, which clarified and streamlined the way civil protection orders were heard by magistrates and greatly expanded their authority and strengthened the duration of such orders.

The third rule change that he had a hand in expanded the rules on service by publication to allow publication of divorce and post-divorce notices on the clerk of court’s website.

“It is one thing to hear cases, but to have had a hand in changing the law has been very rewarding,” he said. “I have been privileged to be a part of legal history.”

The future looks just as rewarding, from Huberman’s point of view.

“I miss seeing the people at court every day,” he said, “but the flexibility I now have is pretty nice. So is not catching up with work at night.”

As a certified mediator, with his work and organizational background, Huberman sees an opportunity to practice in this capsacity. He said that he has been very successful in mediations when assigned them by the judge and thinks that area is a natural for him and one that he would continue to find very rewarding.

Personally, he said he now has more time for his family and recently returned from watching the debut of his daughter’s one-woman play in New York.

Huberman is a veteran web developer, which he says will help with the different organizations that he is now heading. In fact, he developed Judge Smith’s website, which was the Mahoning County court system’s first website.

He said he will also have time for his organic garden, a centerpiece of the plant-based lifestyle he has lived his entire life.

“I have been lucky and privileged in my life,” he said. Doing what he loves, he said, “you never work a day in your life.”


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