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...
David Shulman
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...
Using Claude in a browser is a conversation. You type, it writes back, you copy what it gave you and go do something with it yourself. Cowork is different. Cowork is the desktop version of Claude that actually interacts with the programs on my computer. It opens Word, edits documents, organizes files on my hard...
A client forwarded me an article last week. Same client who forwards me an article every couple of months. The article was real. The estate tax it described was real. It just doesn’t apply to anyone who lives in Florida. There is no Florida estate tax. There hasn’t been one in over twenty years. Florida’s...