Two guardianship cases can have nearly identical facts and finish on completely different timelines. The difference isn’t complexity. It’s whether anyone is fighting. Jill on what actually drives the timeline: An uncontested guardianship in Broward County, with a cooperative family and a competent petitioner, can move from filing to letters in four to six weeks....
A safe full of gold turns a simple Florida estate into a formal one before the personal representative even gets back to the car. The shortcut disappears, the duties multiply, and the family dynamics get worse because the ring money is now real money. In this Ask Jill episode, Jill R. Ginsberg and David A....
Most guardianship cases move at the pace of the court calendar. Emergency temporary guardianships don’t. When someone is being actively harmed — financially, physically, or both — the regular timeline breaks down. You don’t have weeks for the examining committee, the hearing, the order. You need authority now. Florida law provides for that, but the...
Most guardianship cases in Florida aren’t handled by board-certified elder law attorneys. They’re handled by general practitioners, probate attorneys who occasionally take a guardianship, or estate planning attorneys who got asked by a client and didn’t say no. That’s not a moral failing. It’s a market reality. There aren’t enough board-certified elder law attorneys in...
Parent dies. Life insurance pays out. The kids are named as beneficiaries. Nobody can touch the money. Not the surviving parent, not the grandparent raising the kids. In Florida, a minor cannot legally receive and control money outright, and most families don’t see this coming until they’re already standing in the courthouse. In this week’s...
People come in convinced they’re going to win the fight over who should serve as guardian. Sometimes they do. More often, the court resolves the fight by appointing someone none of them wanted. Jill on how that plays out in practice: Florida has a statutory preference for who should serve as guardian — §744.312 lists...
When a client walks into my office wanting to start a foundation, the first question I have to answer is whether they want a private foundation or a donor advised fund. From the outside the two structures look almost identical. The tax mechanics and operating rules underneath are not, and most of the time the...
By the time someone calls about a parent being financially exploited, money is usually already gone. The question is whether more is about to leave and what can stop it. Jill on what happens when an exploitation call comes in: The first 48 hours matter because financial exploitation tends to escalate. The person doing it...