After her divorce in 2013, Liz Martinez was supposed to receive more than $800 dollars a month in child support from her ex-husband. But the 32-year-old mother of three said he never delivered.

"I was constantly going back to court," she recalled. "And then he was saying he was trying to find a job because his G.I. bill ran out. And then he didn't bring proof of that."

Martinez said she really needed the money. She had just lost her job.

"It got to one point where my kids couldn't even have a Christmas," she explained, adding that she fell back on her rent. "I did have to swallow my pride and I did stand on that welfare line because I refused to lose my apartment, and I refused to end up in a shelter."

It took Martinez a year to collect about $3500 dollars in child support because Family Court kept adjourning the case. Her pro bono lawyer, Rene Kathawala of the firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, said she's still owed more than $26,000 dollars.

"We had to file another violation petition" in 2017, he added. In the fall, he said, Martinez's ex-husband told the court he finally got a job. But he still didn't pay any child support.

Kathawala is now co-counsel in a lawsuit against Family Court with the group Sanctuary for Families. It's going to court Thursday. They're representing nine women, including Martinez, who struggled to collect child support. The plaintiffs also seek class action status on behalf of women all over the state.

"There are parties who had cases for over three years, two years, a year," said Kathawala. Some are owed more than $100,000.

Kathawala claims these delays violate a state requirement that child support cases must be completed in 90 days. This is to meet a federal mandate for states to receive welfare, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. The goal is to keep families off of welfare, by collecting child support in a timely manner.

The lawsuit claims New York can't be living up to this requirement because only 58 percent of more than 600,000 non-custodial parents in arrears during Fiscal Year 2016 made any payments. Nationally, the figure is 64 percent.

But Kathawala said Family Court does have a way to prompt non-custodial parents who don't pay child support.

"It's our belief that if the court, on a regular basis, processed these cases quickly, issued a remedy that said if you don't pay something meaningful you'll be jailed, the culture of the court would change," he explained.

The threat of jail, he said, is the only thing that forced Martinez's ex husband to finally pay something. And he said the court needs to take stronger action because parents are not entitled to free lawyers when seeking child support, even though non-custodial parents are entitled to public defenders.

The Office of Court Administration is seeking to dismiss the lawsuit. 

"Along with vastly overstating the scope of the problem and misunderstanding the requirements of the laws and court rule upon which they rely, this suit is yet another backward looking one," said spokesman Lucian Chalfan.

He said the backlogs continue "to improve dramatically" because of efforts by the chief judge. He pointed to new special courtrooms to expedite child support cases and said "a dashboard is about to go into operation enhancing our ability to track the cases in a real time basis."

Kathawala agreed things seem to be moving faster now in New York City, but said he wants to see more data from the court. "Adjournments are still being granted without cause," he stated.