It happened just before Christmas. A sad tale of an American family stranded by their adoption intermediaries. This family had worked for two years to welcome a new child to their family. Now instead of building a life with that child, they are suing their former agency, alleging it did not have the proper credentials at the time they began to work with it. Nobody wants their adoption journey to end like that.

What are the proper credentials? The most important word for anybody selecting an agency for an adoption in Russia now is this: accreditation. In other words, the agency has the legal authority from Moscow to help with your adoption. An agency can have the cutest baby pictures in the world, it can have lovely employees who speak fluent Russian. But none of that matters if it doesn't have accreditation.

Accreditation is a relatively new development in Russia, prompted by Russia's desire to make its adoption procedures conform to an international treaty known as the Hague Convention On Intercountry Adoption. It has caused some turmoil in recent years as agencies worked to meet its criteria: My second adoption took nearly 18 months to complete because accreditation standards were in flux.

Luckily, it isn't hard to find out now whether the agency you are considering is accredited. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow maintains a list on its Web site, though you have to scroll down to the bottom of this page. The top list contains agencies that have been fully accredited; the second, far larger list below is of the agencies that have successfully registered as a "non-governmental organization" or NGO, and are awaiting accreditation, or in many cases, re-accreditation. While these regulatory changes have caused nonstop problems over the last two years, there is now a light at the end of the tunnel: These accreditations will be permanent.

So what if the agency you are considering isn't now accredited? Ask it when its last accreditation expired, and where it stands in the process to get accredited again. The agency won't be able to tell you when it will get its accreditation (the process is still too unpredictable for that). But the answers you get will go a long way to helping you decide whether to begin working with an agency that doesn't yet have accreditation.

There are a lot of other questions to ask to help you pick the right agency. I'll get to those soon.