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....
Guardianship
Most attorneys who handle guardianship aren’t board certified in elder law. The certification is rare for a reason — the Florida Bar makes it hard to get and hard to keep. Jill on what it actually requires: Florida has 27 board certification specialty areas. Elder law is one of them. To become certified, an attorney...
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...
The day your disabled child turns 18, you stop being their legal decision-maker. The school stops talking to you. The doctor stops talking to you. The bank, the Social Security office, the residential provider — none of them are required to acknowledge you as having any authority over your adult child. As a matter of...
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....
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...
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...