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. A ward whose accounts were being drained by a romance scammer has the accounts frozen, the bleeding stopped, and in some cases recovered funds back. A ward who was isolated by a caregiver is back in contact with their family. A ward whose home was about to be foreclosed is in a stable living situation with their needs being met.
These don’t make headlines. They don’t generate appellate opinions. They don’t get cited in legal journals. They’re the day-to-day result of guardianship work done right.
Recovery of funds is the rare bright spot. In most exploitation cases, the money is gone. But sometimes — when the bank moves fast, when the scammer is domestic, when the bad actor still has assets — money can be clawed back through litigation against the exploiter, through reversed transactions, or through orders compelling restitution. Those recoveries fund the ward’s care for years.
The other category of wins: the fight that ends. A contested case where two siblings have been at war for eighteen months, and at some point the lawyers and the court manage to reach a structure everyone can live with. The professional guardian gets appointed. The family agrees on the placement. The accounting issues get resolved. The case closes. The ward is in a stable situation. That’s a win, even though nobody got everything they wanted.
What we don’t celebrate is volume. Some firms measure success in cases handled. We measure it in cases where the outcome was actually better than what would have happened if we hadn’t been involved. That’s a smaller number, but it’s the number that matters.
The cases I don’t think about are the ones where the result was foregone. The cases I do think about are the ones where the intervention made the difference — where the ward’s life is materially better because someone moved fast, filed the right petition, made the right argument, or stopped the right thing from happening. Those are the cases that justify the work.