Your mother has stopped opening the bills. A new friend drives her to the bank. Last week she wired money to someone she has never met. You want to step in, and you find out that in Florida no one, not a spouse and not a child, automatically has the legal right to manage another...
Look at the deed before you read the will. For a Florida homestead, the deed usually answers the question the will was trying to. This illustrated video follows one family through the possibilities. It is a fictional family, and the narration is synthetic, but the rules are real. It starts with how the house is...
A will that leaves the Florida homestead to the wrong person is not rewritten by the court. It is disregarded, and section 732.401 of the Florida Statutes supplies the ending instead: a surviving spouse who can live in the house but cannot sell it, and children who own it but cannot use it. This video...
Most people assume the will decides who gets the house. In Florida, if you leave a spouse or a child under 18, it usually doesn’t. That is the whole point of this video. It is animated, it runs about five minutes, and it follows one house through four family situations: married with grown children, married...
The Community Foundation of Broward named my partner Jill Ginsberg its Professional Advisors Council Member of the Month for July and published a Q&A with her that’s worth reading. The Professional Advisors Council is the Foundation’s group of estate attorneys, CPAs, and financial advisors who work with it on their clients’ charitable giving. Jill’s connection...
Most legal work doesn’t have a clean ending. Guardianship sometimes does. Jill on what the wins actually look like: The wins in guardianship aren’t verdicts. They’re stabilizations. A ward who was wandering out of the house at night is in a memory care unit where the doors are secured and the staff knows their name....
Effective July 1, 2026, Florida raised the estate-value limit for summary administration from $75,000 to $150,000. The change came in CS/HB 1337 (chapter 2026-57, Laws of Florida), the most significant adjustment to Florida’s small-estate procedures in twenty-five years. The $75,000 figure had been in place since 2001, while everything an estate holds — home equity...
Most law firms will tell you they take every client who walks in the door. That’s not a virtue. It’s a business model. Jill was asked whether there are clients or situations she won’t take. Her answer: The policy is simple. If a client is nasty to the paralegals, they get fired. Not reprimanded. Not...