Most attorneys who handle elder law gravitate toward the planning side — Medicaid, special needs, asset protection. Jill went the other direction.
Jill on why:
Elder law is a broad category. It includes long-term care planning, public benefits, special needs trusts, advance directives, guardianship, and related litigation. Within that broad category, guardianship is its own world. It has its own statutory framework, its own court rules, its own procedural rhythm, and its own subset of practitioners.
Most elder law attorneys do guardianship occasionally — when a planning case turns into a crisis, when a long-time client needs an emergency intervention. They handle it because they have to. Some do it well. Some don’t.
What Jill is describing is the pull of the work itself. Guardianship is one of the few areas of legal practice where you can see the result of what you did. The ward is in a safer place. The bleeding stopped. The exploitation ended. The family fight resolved. Money came back into the account. There’s a tangible outcome you had something to do with.
That’s not true of most legal work. Estate planning is preventive — you’re solving for problems that may or may not happen. Probate is administrative — you’re moving paper. Litigation is uncertain — you’re advocating for an outcome you may or may not get. Guardianship sits in a different place. The crisis is real, the intervention is real, and the result is visible.
The other reason: guardianship attracts the cases nobody else wants. A family with a parent who has dementia and a romance scammer draining the accounts isn’t bringing that case to a 200-attorney full-service firm. They’re bringing it to someone who handles these cases all the time and isn’t going to be surprised by anything. There’s a satisfaction in being the person who can take that case and know what to do.
The work is hard. The clients are often in crisis. The court schedules are unforgiving. But it’s one of the few places in the law where you can finish a case and know exactly what you accomplished.