Planning for your later years often requires confronting difficult questions, but having a plan can minimize stress and uncertainty for you and your loved ones in difficult times. That’s why turning to a trusted professional with experience in elder law is important. So, the natural question becomes, What can an elder law attorney do for you?
At Brockstedt Mandalas Federico LLC (BMF), our attorneys can review your circumstances to help you anticipate potential issues and plan for worst-case scenarios. We provide estate planning services with a focus on elder law, helping individuals and their loved ones prepare for the day when they may need someone to help manage their affairs or provide long-term daily assistance. Contact our lawyers today.
What Does an Elder Law Attorney Do? Key Things to Know
If you are asking what does an elder law attorney do, here is what our Delaware elder law attorneys think is most important to understand.
- Elder law covers far more than estate planning, including incapacity planning, long-term care and Medicaid planning, and guardianship.
- In Delaware, Medicaid limits countable assets to $2,000 and monthly income to $2,485 in 2026, with a five-year lookback period on asset transfers.
- A power of attorney and living will let someone you trust make decisions for you if you become medically incapacitated.
- Without advance planning in place, a court-supervised guardianship may be the only way for a loved one to manage your affairs.
What Is an Elder Law Attorney?
Elder law attorneys help with the legal aspects of aging. We offer assistance with estate planning and help ensure you have the necessary protections in place if you become unable to care for yourself. Working with an elder lawyer means knowing what will happen and having the documents and plans in place to ensure you get what you need and your intentions become a reality. Your attorney coordinates various areas of your life to create a comprehensive, efficient plan for the years to come.
Estate Planning
Estate planning involves creating legal documents that declare what should happen to your property after you die. Often, estate planning involves coordinating wills, trusts, and beneficiary designations on your financial accounts and insurance policies.
In consultation with you, an elder attorney drafts documents to accomplish your unique goals. One of the most common estate planning strategies involves combining a revocable living trust with a will. Your lawyer creates a trust document for you that:
- Specifies the terms for how the trust must operate,
- Names the trust’s trustee and defines their role,
- Establishes what powers you have over property in the trust,
- Defines who should receive property (the trust’s beneficiaries) and when,
- Identifies what circumstances or expenses justify the trustee’s distribution of funds, and
- Declares what should happen when you die.
A revocable trust allows you to retain control over the assets it holds. You can also cancel the trust and transfer assets back to yourself at almost any time. Your elder lawyer helps you understand the trust’s benefits and how the trust works, so you know what to expect and what you can do with it.
Often, individuals pair revocable living trusts with pour-over wills. While you might transfer most of your property into the trust, you may leave certain assets out. A pour-over will leaves instructions for assets you do not transfer into your revocable trust. Elder lawyers can draft wills that are legally effective when the time comes.
Incapacity Planning
Another critical part of elder law is planning for the possibility of medical incapacity. If you become medically incapacitated, you are still living but no longer able to make decisions for yourself. In such circumstances, you need someone else with legal authority to make decisions for you.
Your elder lawyer helps you make a plan for the possibility that you cannot manage your affairs, temporarily or permanently. Typically, we help you create a power of attorney to ensure someone has authority to manage your affairs if you lose the ability, and can cover:
- Medical decisions,
- Legal matters, and
- Finances.
When you create your power of attorney, we help you decide what powers the person you select will have. Your lawyer also ensures the power becomes effective only if you become medically incapacitated, not earlier.
We can also help you create a living will, also called an advanced healthcare directive, in which you define the medical treatments you do or do not want to receive in advance.
Long-Term Care and Medicaid Planning
Even though the government estimates that a majority of adults will need long-term care in their lives, long-term care costs an exorbitant amount. Elder lawyers help you plan for the possibility that you may need long-term care at some point in the future and coordinate that care with the federal Medicaid program.
That program covers individuals’ long-term care needs when they have limited resources and limited income. In Delaware in 2026, you cannot own more than $2,000 in countable assets or earn more than $2,485 per month and qualify for coverage. Many people have heard they have to spend down their assets before they become eligible.
Your elder lawyer can identify ways to structure your estate to qualify for Medicaid sooner and then guide you through the process, which requires careful planning and timing considerations. We help you use irrevocable trusts, which strictly limit your ability to control assets but allow distributions for certain types of expenses. You may use a Medicaid Asset Protection Trust (MAPT) or a Miller Trust (also called a Qualified Income Trust) to help you meet Medicaid qualifications.
Medicaid and Long-Term Care Crisis Planning
Medicaid includes a five-year lookback period. If you transferred assets away during the five years immediately preceding your Medicaid application, the government may add them to your countable assets even if you do not currently own them—if you transferred them away for less than fair market value.
If you need care sooner than the five years, an elder lawyer can help you structure your finances to save more of what you own. We might, for example, advise gifting strategies, help you determine what you can permissibly spend funds on without running into lookback questions, or annuities that route assets into income for your spouse.
Guardianship
When someone can no longer manage their own affairs and does not have a power of attorney, an elder lawyer can help you establish a guardianship for them. You can only establish guardianships over individuals with serious difficulty managing their own lives.
Guardianships require a relatively intensive court process. By law, the guardianship must be as limited as is reasonable based on the individual’s abilities, and the limitations that a guardianship places mean the process involves extra legal requirements. The complexity of guardianship proceedings typically makes the guidance of a knowledgeable attorney critical.
What Are the Benefits of Working with an Elder Lawyer?
Elder law attorneys can help you:
- Organize your estate into a manageable system,
- Create instructions for your loved ones to follow upon death or incapacity,
- Reduce costs related to long-term care, and
- Have peace of mind that your loved ones will honor your wishes.
One of the primary benefits of working with an elder lawyer is the peace of mind it brings—you know you have a plan, and, ideally, your loved ones do, too.
What Does an Elder Law Attorney Do? Common Questions
Straight answers to what our Delaware elder law attorneys get asked most before a first conversation.
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An elder law attorney helps older adults and their families plan for aging, incapacity, and long-term care. This typically includes estate planning with wills and trusts, powers of attorney and living wills, Medicaid planning for long-term care costs, and guardianship when someone can no longer manage their own affairs.
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Estate planning focuses on what happens to your property after death, usually through wills, trusts, and beneficiary designations. Elder law includes estate planning but also covers incapacity planning, long-term care and Medicaid planning, and guardianship, addressing legal needs that can arise while you are still alive.
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Medicaid planning helps you qualify for long-term care coverage without exhausting your assets first. In Delaware, Medicaid limits countable assets to $2,000 and monthly income to $2,485 in 2026, subject to a five-year lookback period. An elder law attorney can use tools like a Medicaid Asset Protection Trust to help you plan around these rules.
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Without a valid power of attorney, your family may need to petition a court to establish a guardianship before anyone can legally manage your affairs. An elder law attorney can help you avoid this by preparing a power of attorney and a living will in advance, so someone you trust already has authority if needed.
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It is best to contact an elder law attorney before a health crisis occurs, since incapacity and Medicaid planning both work better with advance preparation. If you are already facing a long-term care need or a loved one can no longer manage their affairs, an elder law attorney can still help you respond quickly.
Contact an Elder Law Attorney Today
Still wondering what can an elder law attorney do for you? At BMF, our elder law attorneys can review your circumstances and help you create a tailored plan that reduces uncertainty, allowing you to focus on what’s most important: your life and your family.
There are many strategies that you can pursue to reduce the burdens on yourself and your loved ones as you age. Reach out today to discuss your options.
Legal References Used to Inform This Page
To ensure the accuracy and clarity of this page, we referenced official legal and other resources during the content development process:
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