A widow with the death certificate, the letters of administration, and the will still got told by Apple she needed a court order to access her late husband’s photos. Thirty years of family pictures behind a login. That is where most families are right now, and almost nobody sees it coming. In this video, Jill...
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....
A safe full of gold turns a simple Florida estate into a formal one before the personal representative even gets back to the car. The shortcut disappears, the duties multiply, and the family dynamics get worse because the ring money is now real money. In this Ask Jill episode, Jill R. Ginsberg and David A....
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...
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...