Law Office of Michael W. Cooper

Despite well-publicized cases like that of Terri Schiavo, most Americans still do not have "advance directives" that give caregivers instructions on the kind of care they would like to receive should they become terminally ill or permanently unconscious.

This should not be a surprise, according to a new study published in the January 17, 2011, issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine by researchers who looked at advance directive laws nationwide. Each state has its own laws on advance directives, but the researchers found that all states erect barriers that make it difficult or impossible for individuals -- particularly the isolated elderly and terminally ill -- to complete advance directives.

"Advance directives" is an umbrella term for documents that allow individuals to communicate their end-of-life wishes if they are unable to do so themselves. Also known as medical directives, these documents typically include a "living will" that gives instructions regarding treatment if the individual becomes terminally ill or is in a persistent vegetative state, and the designation of a health care proxy (also called a health care power of attorney), someone to speak on the individual's behalf and ensure that her wishes will be carried out.

The new study, "Lost in Translation: The Unintended Consequences of Advance Directive Law on Clinical Care," details a number of roadblocks preventing the wider use of advance directives. For example, researchers found that the advance directive documents in use in all the states are written above a 12th-grade reading level, when 40 percent of Americans can read no higher than an 8th grade level.

The researchers also found that 35 states do not allow oral advance directives and 48 states require witness signatures, a notary public, or both. Both restrictions effectively guarantee that many isolated elderly individuals will not let their end-of-life wishes be known, they note. And the only people some terminally ill patients trust are health providers and social workers, but state laws ban such individuals from serving as health care proxies.

In addition, many gay or unmarried patients may be without legally valid people they can turn to as health care decision makers. Forty states do not allow same-sex or domestic partners to be the default health care proxy if an individual hasn't chosen one, as would be the case for heterosexual spouses.

The researchers' recommendations include improving document readability, allowing oral advance directives, eliminating witness or notary requirements, and removing bans on certain individuals serving as proxies.

To read an abstract of the study, click here. Among the study's authors is Charles P. Sabatino, director of the American Bar Association Commission on Law and Aging.

For a Reuters article on the study, click here.

For more on health care decisions, click here.

Many people incorrectly believe that once someone enters a nursing home, their freedom is over. In fact, nursing home residents have many rights, and it is important to know those rights and to be able to enforce them.

Nursing home residents' rights are protected under both state and federal law. In broad terms, nursing homes are required to ensure that every nursing home resident be given whatever services are necessary to function at the highest level possible. Following are some of the specific protections that residents have:

•Nursing home residents have the right to privacy in all aspects of their care. This means phone calls and mail should be private, and residents should be able to close doors and windows. In addition, residents may bring belongings from home, and nursing home staff is required to assist the residents in protecting those belongings.

•Residents have the right to go to bed and to get up when they choose, eat a variety of snacks outside meal times, decide what to wear, choose activities, and decide how to spend their time. The nursing home must offer a choice at main meals, because individual tastes and needs vary.

•Residents have the right to leave the nursing home and belong to any church or social group they wish to.

•Residents must be allowed to participate in planning their care. Residents may also manage their own financial affairs.

•Residents may not be moved to a different room, a different nursing home, a hospital, back home or anywhere else without advance notice and an opportunity for appeal.

For more information on fighting a nursing home discharge, click here.

For a full list of nursing home resident rights, click here.

If a disagreement with the nursing home does arise, there are a number of steps you can take to enforce the resident's rights. The first step would be to talk to the nursing home staff directly. This may be all it takes to solve the problem. If that doesn't work, then you may need to talk to a supervisor or administrator. The next step is to contact the ombudsperson assigned to the nursing home. He or she should be able to intervene and get an appropriate result. Contact information for the Ombudsman Program in your state can be found at: www.ltcombudsman.org/ombudsman. 

Additional steps include reporting the nursing home to the licensing agency and hiring a geriatric care manager to intervene. If the direct approach isn't working, you may need to hire a lawyer to try and resolve the issues. The last resort is to move the resident to a different facility.

For more information on resolving nursing home disputes, click here.

A report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warns that given the weak economy, Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) are facing challenging times. While few CCRCs have gone bankrupt so far, CCRCs are primarily regulated by states rather than by the federal government, and states vary in how much they help ensure that CCRCs stay solvent or don't sharply raise monthly fees on residents.

CCRCs offer the entire residential continuum of care — from independent housing to assisted living to round-the-clock nursing services — under one "roof." Residents pay an often sizeable entry fee and an adjustable monthly rent in return for the guarantee of care for the rest of their life. Many older Americans sell their homes, which are often their primary asset, to pay the required fees, and, as a result, their ability to support themselves is inextricably tied to the long-term viability of their CCRC. For example, residents could lose the refundable portion of their entrance fees which may amount to hundreds of thousand of dollars or more if a CCRC encounters financial difficulties.

In its new report, "Continuing Care Retirement Communities Can Provide Benefits, but Not Without Some Risk," the GAO notes that although few CCRCs have failed, "challenging economic and real estate market conditions have negatively affected some CCRCs' occupancy and financial condition." The GAO's report notes that CCRC residents "are at a disadvantage because any claim they have on a CCRC that is forced into bankruptcy is subordinate to the claims of secured creditors, such as tax-exempt bondholders and mortgage lenders." (Last November, Newsweek reported on bankruptcies hitting retirement communities.)

In its review of state regulation of CCRCs, the GAO found that 38 states have some level of regulation specifically addressing CCRCs, while 12 states and the District of Columbia do not. The states that have no specific CCRC regulation are: Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia,. As a group, these states have few CCRCs and two — Alaska and Colorado — have none.

States that do regulate CCRCs generally require that the communities periodically submit financial information, but the type of information required and what the state does with it varies, and not all states do their own financial examinations. The GAO looked closely at how eight selected states — California, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin — regulate CCRCs with respect to financial oversight and consumer protection.

CCRCs generally depend on high occupancy rates to remain financially viable. Slow real estate markets like the current one can make it difficult for older Americans to sell their homes to pay CCRC entrance fees. As a result, occupancy levels at many CCRCs have fallen. In addition, some older Americans may be staying in their homes longer and thus moving into CCRCs when they need more care, which can worsen CCRCs' long-term financial picture.

One industry rating firm said the outlook for CCRCs in 2009 and into 2010 is negative because of their declining liquidity and other financial ratios, tightening financial markets, and difficult real estate markets. But the firm also noted that these negative effects could be softened somewhat by factors like the continuing strong demand for entrance into CCRCs and favorable labor costs.

Officials of some CCRC residents associations said state regulators need to provide more overall financial oversight to compensate for the short-term focus that most CCRCs have on their financial solvency. And actuaries told the GAO that, overall, only a few states are appropriately using actuarial studies to assess CCRC providers and that many states are using very little actuarial information for financial oversight.

Many people think that estate plans are for someone else, not them. They may rationalize that they are too young or don't have enough money to reap the tax benefits of a plan. But as the following list makes clear, estate planning is for everyone, regardless of age or net worth.

1. Loss of capacity. What if you become incompetent and unable to manage your own affairs? Without a plan the courts will select the person to manage your affairs. With a plan, you pick that person (through a power of attorney).

2. Minor children. Who will raise your children if you die? Without a plan, a court will make that decision. With a plan, you are able to nominate the guardian of your choice.

3. Dying without a will. Who will inherit your assets? Without a plan, your assets pass to your heirs according to your state's laws of intestacy (dying without a will). Your family members (and perhaps not the ones you would choose) will receive your assets without benefit of your direction or of trust protection. With a plan, you decide who gets your assets, and when and how they receive them.

4. Blended families. What if your family is the result of multiple marriages? Without a plan, children from different marriages may not be treated as you would wish. With a plan, you determine what goes to your current spouse and to the children from a prior marriage or marriages.

5. Children with special needs. Without a plan, a child with special needs risks being disqualified from receiving Medicaid or SSI benefits, and may have to use his or her inheritance to pay for care. With a plan, you can set up a Supplemental Needs Trust that will allow the child to remain eligible for government benefits while using the trust assets to pay for non-covered expenses.

6. Keeping assets in the family. Would you prefer that your assets stay in your own family? Without a plan, your child's spouse may wind up with your money if your child passes away prematurely. If your child divorces his or her current spouse, some of your assets could go to the spouse. With a plan, you can set up a trust that ensures that your assets will stay in your family and, for example, pass to your grandchildren.

7. Financial security. Will your spouse and children be able to survive financially? Without a plan and the income replacement provided by life insurance, your family may be unable to maintain its current living standard. With a plan, life insurance can mean that your family will enjoy financial security.

8. Retirement accounts. Do you have an IRA or similar retirement account? Without a plan, your designated beneficiary for the retirement account funds may not reflect your current wishes and may result in burdensome tax consequences for your heirs (although the rules regarding the designation of a beneficiary have been eased considerably). With a plan, you can choose the optimal beneficiary.

9. Business ownership. Do you own a business? Without a plan, you don't name a successor, thus risking that your family could lose control of the business. With a plan, you choose who will own and control the business after you are gone.

10. Avoiding probate. Without a plan, your estate may be subject to delays and excess fees (depending on the state), and your assets will be a matter of public record. With a plan, you can structure things so that probate can be avoided entirely.

Nursing home patients are less likely to be subjected to unwanted medical interventions or hospitalizations under a program that offers an alternative to simple advance directives, according to a new study.

While advance directives or "living wills" provide general guidance on what type of care a patient would like, they are not consistently followed, in part because they don't give health care professionals explicit instructions for making critical decisions about a patient's care. Studies show they often have little impact on end-of-life decision making.

An alternative has emerged in recent years and has been implemented or is being developed in 32 states: the Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST). The POLST uses a standardized medical order form to indicate which types of life-sustaining treatment a seriously ill patient wants or doesn't want if his or her condition worsens.

The POLST form records whether the patient wants to receive CPR, hospitalization, ICU care, antibiotics, artificial nutrition, intubation, mechanical ventilation and other medical interventions. A physician (or a nurse practitioner in some states) reviews and signs the form and it is added to the patient's medical file, moving with the patient and honored across all settings of care. (The POLST program is known by different names in different states. For example, in New York it's Medical Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (MOLST), and in West Virginia it's Physicians Orders for Scope of Treatment (POST).)

A new study published in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society found that people with POLST forms were more likely to receive the treatment they wanted. For example, those who said they primarily wanted relief from pain were 59 percent less likely to receive unwanted treatments than those who had only a "Do Not Resuscitate" order. Meanwhile, patients who requested on their POLST that everything be done to keep them alive were just as likely to receive full treatment as were other patients.

Something like the POLST is particularly welcome in nursing home settings because the common practice is to do everything possible for patients despite the fact that only about 12 percent of nursing home patients want intensive care treatments, according to study co-author Susan Tolle of the Oregon Health&Science University. "There are many health care professionals who welcome this, particularly emergency medical personnel," Tolle said.

Meanwhile, the authors of another recent study conclude that elderly patients dying in hospitals "often receive burdensome care immediately before death that may not match patient preferences." The researchers see a need for improved communication between clinicians and patients or families at the beginning of intensive treatments.

For a Kaiser Health News article about the POLST study, click here.

For more on health care decisions, click here.

LegalZoom, one of the most prominent sellers of do-it-yourself wills and other estate planning documents, is the target of a class action lawsuit in California charging that the company engages in deceptive business practices and is practicing law without a license.

The lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on May 27, 2010, by Katherine Webster, who is the niece of the late Anthony J. Ferrantino and the executor of Mr. Ferrantino's estate.

Knowing that he had only a few months to live, Mr. Ferrantino asked Ms. Webster in July 2007 to help him use LegalZoom to execute a will and living trust. Based on LegalZoom's advertising, Ms. Webster says she believed that the documents they created would be legally binding and that if they encountered any problems, the company's customer service department would resolve them.

But after the living trust documents were created and signed, Ms. Webster could not transfer any of her uncle's assets into the trust because the financial institutions that held his money refused to accept the LegalZoom documents as valid. Ms. Webster tried to get help from LegalZoom, with no success. The trust was still not funded when Mr. Ferrantino died in November 2007.

Ms. Webster was forced to hire an estate planning attorney, who petitioned the court to allow the post-death funding of the trust. The attorney then had to convince the banks to transfer the funds -- a more difficult task following Mr. Ferrantino's death. The attorney also discovered that the will LegalZoom created for Mr. Ferrantino had not been properly witnessed. All this cost Mr. Ferrantino's estate thousands of dollars.

The lawsuit claims that Ms. Webster and others like her relied on misleading statements by LegalZoom, including that LegalZoom carefully reviews customer documents, that it guarantees its customers 100 percent satisfaction with its services, that its documents are the same quality as those prepared by an attorney, and that the documents are effective and dependable.

"Nowhere in the [company's] manual do defendants explain that using LegalZoom is not the same as using an attorney and that its documents are only 'customized' to the extent that the LegalZoom computer program inputs your name and identifying information, but not tailored to your specific circumstances," the lawsuit states, adding that "the customer service representatives are not lawyers and cannot by law provide legal advice."

Ms. Webster is suing not only on her behalf but on behalf of anyone in California who paid LegalZoom for a living trust, will, living will, advance health care directive or power of attorney. The lawsuit estimates this class embraces more than 3,000 individuals.

"LegalZoom's business is based on nurturing the false sense of security that people do not need to hire a traditional attorney," says San Francisco attorney Robert Arns, one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit. "The complaint points out that LegalZoom advertises that you don't need a real attorney because its work is legally binding and reliable. That's misleading. Improperly prepared estate planning documents are a ticking time bomb that can result in improper tax consequences and other items that could cost the estate and heirs huge sums."

"LegalZoom preys on people when they're at their most vulnerable, when they are of advanced age or poor health and need a will or a living trust," adds San Francisco elder abuse attorney Kathryn Stebner, Ms. Webster's lead counsel.

One of the defendants named in the suit is LegalZoom co-founder Robert Shapiro, who appears on the LegalZoom Web page and TV ads and who is best-known for being one of O.J. Simpson's attorneys.

This is not the first suit against LegalZoom. In December 2009, a Missouri man who paid LegalZoom to prepare his will sued the company for engaging in the unauthorized practice of law (Janson v. LegalZoom). The lawsuit is also seeking class action status. LegalZoom is trying to have the case removed from Missouri state court to the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri.

It is important to keep in mind that the "complaint" in a lawsuit, like the one described above, only presents one side of a legal dispute, and also that the lawsuits described above have not yet been resolved.

Recently a reporter asked ElderLawAnswers founder and president, Harry S. Margolis, some questions for an article on talking with aging parents or other family members about sensitive issues such as wills, funeral arrangements, assisted living or medical treatment wishes. Here are the reporter's questions and Harry's answers.

The earlier the better, but every family is different, and raising these issues can be more or less uncomfortable depending on the family dynamics. Certainly, if there is an illness or medical emergency, that can serve as justification for beginning the discussion.

Rather than focusing on the parent or other family member's current or possible future physical and mental decline, it often works better for the person starting the conversation to focus on his or her own concerns. She can say that she was meeting with her own estate planning attorney, which made her think about her parents situation. Or she can talk about how she is nervous about being able to care for her parents when and if the need comes up. Often parents won't take measures to protect themselves, but they never stop being parents and will respond to a call for help from a child.

In the parent's home.

Not necessarily. A legal consultation would help the children or other family members know what issues to discuss and some of the available options. But the ultimate goal should be for the elder to consult himself or herself with an attorney with elder law experience.

That has to be determined on a case-by-case basis. We always encourage transparency so that all family members are in the loop. However, scheduling can be difficult and too many people involved can be overwhelming. In addition, depending on the circumstances, elder care and planning issues can take several meetings to resolve. Different people may be involved in different meetings depending on the issues being discussed at each.

Follow the advice above. If it's a parent, the child may have to be patient and wait until an opportunity arises to bring the subject up again. Ultimately, it may be impossible to get the parent to participate in any planning. If it's a spouse, this is also true. However, a spouse may be able to take some planning steps on his or her own.

This depends on the state. In some states there are provisions for letting the registry of motor vehicles know of problem drivers. Where family pressure doesn't stop a senior from driving and dementia exists, some of our clients have been successful in disabling vehicles if the senior does not have the capacity to get it fixed.

It depends on the parent or spouse's mental capacity. If they are incompetent, it is possible to go to court to be appointed conservator or guardian and to take over decision making in these areas. Unfortunately, this can be an expensive, time-consuming and cumbersome process.

Plan ahead. All seniors should sit down with an elder law attorney to discuss their goals, concerns and hopes and to develop a plan to reach the goals, address the concerns and give their hopes the opportunity to become realities.

Incapacity has been discussed in some previous articles. For example, you saw a glimpse of it in the article discussing the scenario where a parent died in an accident and the other parent lived, but was temporarily incapacitated, with minor children to care for. The more common scenario is incapacity of an elder due to illness or injury.

A good illustration is a case I had almost 20 years ago. The husband, in his 70's, was an Alzheimer's patient.  A VA hospital with long-term care accommodations accepted him as a long-term care patient, which was a blessing for the wife, for whom the strain of caring for him at home was growing more and more serious. I want to make it clear that she would have kept him at home if the VA hospital hadn't taken him as a patient, but it was wearing on her severely.

She wanted to move closer to the hospital where her husband was being cared for and decided to sell their house for that reason. However, she couldn't, because he was an owner, too, and he could no longer sign any legal documents due to his condition. She retained me to petition the court for a conservatorship of him, so she could get permission to sell the house and to create an estate plan for both of them.

If they had an estate plan sooner, it would have included powers of attorney for each other, and she could have sold the house without a conservatorship, using his power of attorney in place of his signature. Keeping the court out of it would have saved the attorney fees and court costs she incurred and would have been much easier and faster.

Having powers of attorney for purposes like this one, and others, is so very important, provided the power is given upon advice of counsel, with proper safeguards, in a relationship of implicit trust. If not a spouse, the agent could be a child of the person granting the power, or perhaps two children together who must unanimously agree in order to use it.

Besides a specific transaction like this one, the power may be used for a series of actions in the process of qualifying an elder for his or her Veterans Disability Pension (also known as Veterans Aid&Attendance) to help with the cost of assisted living, or qualifying him or her for Medi-Cal to pay the cost of nursing home care, which the person couldn't otherwise afford. With Medi-Cal paying for nursing home care, the person must still pay their "share of cost" amount, but Medi-Cal pays for the remainder at a rate lower than the self-pay rate.

The point is, many people will reach a point where they lack the legal mental capacity to negotiate for themselves and sign documents for themselves, but they won't have to be placed under a court conservatorship if the power of attorney they created, when they were lucid and well, can be used instead. This can save a family a lot of money in attorney fees and court costs, and can also eliminate the delay associated with court proceedings.

The person granting a power of attorney must be careful giving this much power to another person, because powers of attorney are subject to abuse in the wrong hands. That's why I have stated above that they should only be given upon advice of counsel, with proper safeguards, in a relationship of implicit trust.

There is another form of power of attorney in California called Advance Health Care Directive. It allows a person to make his or her decisions about health care, and withdrawal of care, in life-threatening or terminal illness situations, and it specifies the person or persons who will make all of the other decisions, of which there may be many.

The other important document for incapacity planning is the revocable trust, sometimes referred to as a "living trust." That's because it can be a good management tool for the property that it governs, because the creator of the trust has named a successor trustee to administer the property in the trust if the creator of the trust is incapacitated. By this means, the creator's instructions prevail even the creator is no longer the trustee.

So, for example, the successor trustee for the surviving parent in the first scenario could use the money and property in the trust to support the children until the surviving parent's recovery, even though the successor trustee is not the custodian of the children.

There are many ways in which good estate planning can make an incapacity event easier to deal with when and if the time comes. What's most important is that the planning be done well in advance of the incapacity event.

Notice – though Mr. Cooper has many years of experience in estate planning, wills, trusts and probate, this article is not intended as legal advice, and should not be taken as such. There is no substitute for personal legal counsel by a qualified attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.

Besides goodwill, there are great reasons for including charitable bequests in your estate plan.

First and foremost, even if it's a small gift, it means something to your heirs and beneficiaries. It's a clear signal from you to them that there's a bigger picture in life, and that it's a beautiful one you want them to see, and to take a part in. Collective responsibility derives from individual responsibility, and you have an opportunity to set the example for them one more time – the example of how life works best – giving for the benefit of others. They will follow your example.

Next, it means something to the world. You give of substance external to yourself – money or property – but it evidences something internal to yourself – the spirit of the giver. That has meaning for the recipient, of course; let's say, for example, bread on the table. But to everyone in the chain from wheat in the field here to bread from the oven in a distant land, including the recipient, it also has another meaning, even more profound – the spirit of giving is alive in the world, and in motion, everywhere.

And finally, there is always the mundane. A gift to a certain type of irrevocable trust during your lifetime can eliminate the tax you would otherwise pay on sale of highly-appreciated property, produce a stream of income for you during your lifetime if you want, create a financial arrangement within the trust that will replace the entire value of the asset in your estate (technically outside your estate), and make for a gift to your heirs the same as the amount they would have had if you hadn't given the gift. The mechanics of this estate planning device and others using charitable giving as their "engine," are very interesting. People should be sure to discuss these planning devices with their estate planning attorney.

Notice – though Mr. Cooper has many years of experience in estate planning, wills, trusts and probate, this article is not intended as legal advice, and should not be taken as such. There is no substitute for personal legal counsel by a qualified attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.

If you have minor children, the primary importance of estate planning is their physical care, and management of their financial resources, if you are suddenly unavailable. Let's say Mom and Dad are in a bad accident – one dies and the other is unconscious for three weeks and recovers very slowly thereafter. Who has the legal right to custody of the children?

The unconscious parent does, which in practical terms means — no one. So, when the police come to the home and find the children with the babysitter, they will most likely call CPS (Child Protective Services) and have the children taken into protective custody. Not juvenile hall, but rather, short-term foster care until there is a court hearing, hopefully no more than a few days.

Some relatives, the ones CPS can locate quickly, will be notified, and hopefully they will tell others. CPS may decide to release the children to a relative before court – but they are not required to do so. Let's say some relatives come to the hearing. Who among them has the legal right to custody of the children? Still, no one. It's up to the court what to do: release them to someone who asks, or keep them in foster care until there's a further hearing.

Let's say the two sets of grandparents both want the children, and they are both sincere and distraught. They have lawyers. They all tell the court at the hearing what a bad idea it would be for the other set of grandparents to have the children, and they engage in mudslinging. The court decides that this spells trouble, and sees that they are alienating each other so badly that whoever "wins" will interfere with the other set of grandparents' relationship with the children, because they are hopping mad with each other now.

Under these circumstances, the court decides on further foster care until a later hearing when CPS can present a report on what it thinks is best, maybe another ten days from now . . . .

Other relatives contact lawyers, too, and they find out that whoever gets the children will have $1,500.00 per month from Social Security based on the deceased parent's entitlement. Now, more people want them . . . .

What's missing here? What's missing is the information on what the parents would have wanted for their children's placement. No estate plan documents = no one will ever know. All the contestants will tell a different story about what the parents told them, if anything, and so it goes . . . .

Where will the children end up, and when? You can't really tell.

What should have happened?

Let's say, when the police arrived, the babysitter handed them "the letter," prepared by the parents' attorney as part of their estate plan, with the signatures of both parents, saying, "If for any reason we are unavailable to care for our children due to illness, injury, death or other unforseen circumstances, they are to be taken to the home of our dear friends, John and Jane Doe, located at [nearby]. John and Jane are in possession of our California Guardianship Authorization and have full authority to care for our children in our absence, including access to their medical records, authority to consent to their medical treatment, and authority to establish and/or maintain their school enrollment. A copy of the authorization is enclosed with this letter. Our nominations for longer term guardians are the parents of one of us, Mr. and Mrs. Dell and Sunny Jones, Sam Jones' mother and father. They have copies of our wills showing the nomination and will arrive within a few days upon notice from Mr. and Mrs. Doe . . . ."

See the difference? It's hard to imagine documents more precious than these, isn't it?

Of course, the documents in the estate plan go much further, to spell out not just who the children will live with, but also who will be their financial guardians (which may be different from the "live with" guardians), and all the other things needed for raising the children, which may be as detailed as the parents want it to be. In this case, the parent slowly recovering from serious injuries will know that everything is going just as planned, and if he or doesn't recover, everything will still go just as planned.

Like so much of what we do in lawyering, there are contingencies and costs. Obviously, one would hope this accident never happens and Mom and Dad are good to go as parents now and in the future. One would hope "the letter" will never be needed. So, let's say the parents paid for their estate plan documents to be written by their attorney, but "the letter" and the documents irt refers to are never used. Was the additional cost worthwhile?

What do you think?

Notice – though Mr. Cooper has many years of experience in estate planning, wills, trusts and probate, this article is not intended as legal advice, and should not be taken as such. There is no substitute for personal legal counsel by a qualified attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.