Won’t it feel great when you have completed all your legal planning
​to help give your child with a disability a safe and happy future?

 Won’t it feel great knowing all the legal documents are in place to protect your entire family?
Providing future security for your child with a disability and for your entire family is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. All the legal pieces (Will, trusts, guardianship, powers of attorney, etc.) have to fit together.

Parents often contact me because they want me to draft a supplemental needs trust for their child with a disability so that: 
• their child will remain eligible for government benefits,
• the inheritance won’t be spent down for cost-of-care claims,
• they can name someone they trust to manage their child’s future inheritance, 
​- so relatives and friends can make gifts to the trust now.
But the supplemental needs trust is only one part of solving the puzzle of how to protect your entire family if you become incapacitated or die. Some other documents are often needed to ensure everything runs smoothly if a family member becomes ill or dies.

Other documents
​that protect your family:

1. Living Trust

A living trust to manage your assets during your incapacity and to avoid probate after your death. Imagine you have only a will and then you become incapacitated. You’re unable to pay your bills or manage your investments. Who legally can manage your financial affairs? Often a relative will have to be appointed a guardian over your estate. Your guardian will have to get approval from the judge for buying you things, make accountings to the court, post bond.  The process can be inconvenient, costly, and frustrating.

With a living trust, you can avoid the cost, inconvenience, and potential frustration of court oversight. You choose your own successor trustee to act if you are no longer able to manage your financial affairs. For example, when my dad got dementia, I took over as successor trustee of his living trust allowing me to manage his assets and pay his bills. The successor trustee (usually your spouse first), can distribute assets for your benefit, your spouse’s benefit, and for your children. Your family is financially taken care of during your incapacity.

​ Any assets titled in the trust avoid probate.

2. Power of attorney for property

The power of attorney for property lets your agent (typically your spouse first and your next most trusted relative or friend second) sign your name to transact business for you. It’s an incredibly useful document especially if you become incapacitated. For example, if you were to become incapacitated, your agent can sign your name to file your income taxes, or bank for you, sell your car if you can no longer drive, transfer assets just in your name into your trust so the assets will avoid probate, make decisions regarding your IRA or retirement plan. Imagine you’re incapacitated. Your spouse needs to sell your home to downsize into a less expensive condo. To sell your home, if your home is held jointly, your spouse needs to be able to legally sign your name by having a power of attorney for property.

3. Power of attorney for health care

You will need a power of attorney for healthcare naming who you want to make your health care decisions if you cannot make your own health care decisions. The person you name will also be responsible (per your directions) for life-support issues if you become terminally and imminently ill.

4. HIPPA authorization

This permits the people you trust to be able to receive confidential medical information about you. For example, if you become incapacitated and your successor trustee needs to take over to manage the assets in your trust, the financial institutions will often require your successor trustee to provide them with a letter from your doctor stating that you are no longer able to manage your financial affairs. Without this HIPPA authorization, the doctor cannot legally release your confidential medical information to the successor trustee to give to the financial institutions.

5. Pour-over will

Even with a living trust, you’ll still have what’s called a “pour-over” will that acts as a backstop to your living trust. For example, let’s say die with a $20 bill in your pocket. The legal issue is “Who owns the $20?” Your will essentially says “pour” any money that you own individually (without a beneficiary designation or as a joint owner) into your trust, so these assets will flow into your living trust and be distributed or held for your family as you wish, making sure that assets don’t go outright to your child with a disability. It’s also in your will that you name who you want to be the guardian for your children.

6. You may need other documents to protect your family:

• Trusts for your other children,
• Estate tax reduction sub-trusts or an irrevocable life insurance trust,
• Short-term Guardian Designation to legally transfer guardianship power if you go
on a vacation without your child with a disability, need to stay overnight at a hospital, etc.
• Living Will,
• Personal and tangible property memo,
• Tangible property assignment to your trust,
• If you do not become guardian over your adult child with a disability, your adult child with a disability, if mentally
​capable, should have powers of attorney for health care, property, education and a separate HIPPA release.
• Standby Guardian Declaration naming successor guardians,
• Declaration for Mental Health Treatment.

About me

My older brother Jon is dual diagnosed with an intellectual disability and a bipolar disorder. Sharing Jon’s life journey has changed everything for me.

I have concentrated my law practice since 1981 on estate planning for families who have a child with a disability, helping hundreds of parents plan for their child’s safe and happy future. 

I help parents with living trusts, supplemental needs trusts, wills, powers of attorney for health care, powers of attorneys for property, powers of attorney for education, guardianship, and advice on government benefits, and more. ​
​
I received my undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and am a magna cum laude graduate from Kent College of Law.
​
​In my third year of law school, I was near the top of my class, and I thought after graduating I’d join a big law firm. However, at that time my father had recently retired. My mother had passed away my senior year of college. My father was worried about after he died what would happen to Jon. So Dad founded a non-profit organization (still in existence) whose mission was to help parents who had a child with a disability answer the question “What will happen to my child after I die?”

 
​
Dad asked me if I wanted to help him by being a founding volunteer Board member. I said “Sure.” And that decision changed everything for me. It was a glorious time to work side by side with my father. It changed the direction of my career. Instead of joining some big law firm, I chose to open my own law practice helping parents who had a child with a disability protect their child’s future.

​Two years after graduating from law school, in 1983, I wrote the first book in the country on special needs trusts and estate planning for parents who have a child with a disability (no longer in print). In it I also introduced the concept of the Letter of Intent and in 1990 created a Letter of Intent template still used by parents across the country. In 1993, I co-authored the book Planning for the Future: Give Your Child With a Disability the Gift of a Safe and Happy Life (7 later editions and currently out of print).

I have spoken about special needs future and legal planning on public TV, to national, state, and local organizations in the disability field, and to parent and school groups. A wide variety of publications have praised my books including the New York Times, Estate Planning Magazine, Estates, Gifts & Trusts Journal, and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine.
​
 

My prior work with charities and organizations include 

  • Legal Counsel for Estate Planning for Persons with Disabilities (EPPD).
  • Executive Director of the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, currently called Brain and Behavior Research Foundation that since 1987 has awarded more than 380 million to fund more than 5,500 grants to 4,500 scientists around the world.
  • U.S. Representative to the International League on Disabilities – legal rights committee.
  • Founding board member of PACT, one of the first private charitable advocacy, guardianship, and trust organizations in the country.
  • ​Publisher and chief editor of New Ways Magazine, a national publication in the disability field (no longer in print).

I enjoy...

...every second with my family and friends, the outdoors, hiking, trail biking, libraries, manual-shift cars, German Shepherd dogs, the Blackhawks, Steven Pressfield historical fiction, Jack Higgins thriller novels,  Apple products,  listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Mel Torme, Swing Era music, Annie Lennox, Alicia Keys. Favorite movies: Great Escape, Dirty Dozen, Guns of Navarone, Bullitt, To Have and Have Not, African Queen, Roman Holiday, It Happened One Night, Woman of the Year. Favorite TV Shows: Homeland, Foyle's War, Prime Suspect, Elementary, American Idol and the Voice. Other stuff: People with "geeky" pun-filled humor, the "World War II" generation, martial arts, photography, Greek history, western Michigan, Colorado, Devil's Lake, Sanibel and Captiva Islands, most any beach. I'd love to sing or dance, but I can't do either.....yet.

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Office: 401 E. Prospect Ave., Suite 106, Mt. Prospect, IL 60056
Phone: (847) 262-3120