The first time you work with a lawyer or visit an attorney can be scary. Often times, when a client comes to our office, this is the first time they’ve ever worked with an attorney. We promsie to make it a comforting as possible, clients leave our office feeling relieved that they have a guide to lead them through the long-term care legal maze. In helping clients navigate the long-term care legal maze we’ve set up a three-step process.
The Peace of Mind Meeting
At the first meeting, we will welcome you to the firm. Consider this a “get to know you meeting.” At this meeting it is our goal to make you feel comfortable and help you understand the long-term care maze that we are facing, and our experiance in helping clients come out the other side of that maze as successfully as possible. You may have a lot of questions, we’ll begin answering them on a broad level. You may have questions about our experiance, our fees, our process, or just long-term care, VA benefits, Medicaid planning, Alzheimer’s planning or just the law in general. We’ll do our best to answer those questions as well as give you a flavor of what our firm is about. We understand that you may be “interviewing” us for the job. We appreciate the opprotunity to work with your family.
But, understand, you will be interviewed as well.
Our law firm intentially does not allow every client that sits in our office or conference room to join our client family. You must meet certain, strict requirements. First of all, you must be a good person. Life is too short to be serving people who we can’t trust, like, or enjoy their company. Second, you must love someone. That someone can be your spouse who has an Alzheimer’s diagnoses, that could be you dad who is a wartime veteran and now needs home care, or that someone could be mom, who will be moving into a skilled nursing facility. Whoever it is, our client’s must love someone, otherwise why are we doing this planning.
Planning & Design
Before you build a house, you must have a blueprint. Legal planning to navigate the elder law long-term care maze is no different. This second phase of the elder law process invovles taking all the information you’ve provided including assets, income, social security statements, deeds, long-term care costs, DD214′s, etc, etc, and providing a detailed plan and design to navigate the long-term care maze.
This is where the real work happens. This is where the road map to meet all the goals of the family happens, whether that’s VA qualificaiton, long-term care benefits, or Medicaid.
It is vitally important that accurate and up to date inforamtion is provide to the firm as timely as possible. Any variance in what is provided to the firm could lead to headaches down the road in applying for any governmental benefits.
Implementation
Now that the blueprint is in place, we can begin implementing. At this time we know exactly what steps are necessary and we begin implementing the plan to meet the family goals. This may involve execution of legal documents such as powers of attorney, Veterans Asset Protection Trusts, Medicaid Asset Protection Trusts, revocable trusts, Legacy Deeds, Veterans Applicaiton, Medicaid Applications, wills, or patient advocate designations.
Call (248) 481-4000 to schedule your Peace of Mind meeting.