Important legal issues can affect people as they age, and people with special needs are growing in number. Our laws and regulations are becoming more complex, and each state has different laws. Actions taken with regard to a single matter may have unintended legal effects. It’s important for any attorney working with seniors, people with special needs, and their families, to have a broad understanding of the laws that may have an impact on a given situation to avoid future problems.
Elder and Special Needs Law encompasses many different fields of law including:
- Preservation/transfer of assets seeking to avoid spousal impoverishment when one spouse enters a nursing home
- Medicare claims and appeals
- Social Security and disability claims and appeals
- Supplemental and long-term health insurance issues
- Tax planning
- Disability planning, including use of durable powers of attorney, living trusts, “living wills” for financial management and health care decisions, and other means of delegating management and decision-making to another in case of incompetency or incapacity
- Access to health care in a managed care environment
- Conservatorships and guardianships
- Estate planning, including planning for the management of one’s estate during life and its disposition on death through the use of trusts, wills, and other planning documents
- Probate and administration of estates
- Administration and management of trusts
- Long-term care placements in nursing home and life-care communities
- Nursing home issues, including questions of patients’ rights and nursing home quality
- Elder abuse and fraud recovery cases
- Housing issues, including discrimination and home equity conversions
- Age discrimination in employment
- Retirement, including public and private retirement benefits, survivor benefits, and pension benefits
- Health law
- Mental health law
Most attorneys do not specialize in every one of these areas. So when an attorney says he or she practices Elder or Special Needs Law, find out which of these matters the attorney handles. You will want to hire an attorney who regularly handles matters in the area of law of concern to your particular case and who knows enough about the other fields to question whether the action being taken might be affected by laws in any of the other areas of law. For example, if you are going to rewrite your will and your spouse is ill, the attorney needs to know enough about Medicaid to know whether there are legal issues with regard to your spouse’s inheritance.
The Attorneys at Fawcett & Fawcett primarily work with seniors and people with special needs. We appreciate the complex financial and social decisions our clients face. Our attorneys bring to our practice a knowledge of our clients that allows us and our staff to ignore the myths relating to aging and the competence of seniors and people with disabilities. At the same time, we will take into account and empathize with some of the true physical and mental difficulties that often accompany the aging process.