The steps and strategy needed in preparing for a guardianship hearing
were the focus of a recent New York State Bar Association continuing
legal education course sponsored by its Elder Law and Special Needs
section.
“Preparing for a Guardianship Hearing” is the third in a four-part
series detailing key steps involved in preparing for a bench trial for
the appointment of a guardian under Article 81. During the hour-long
seminar, long time elder law and guardianship attorney Emily Ann Klotz
provided tips on handling discovery, outlined steps in preparing a
notice to admit and detailed common motions used in guardianship cases.
While it may seem obvious, Klotz says careful preparation of
witnesses and the potential guardian is essential. Gather witnesses who
will either support or contest the substance of the guardianship
petition including friends, family, social workers, geriatricians and
medical professionals. Investigate witnesses for any conflicts of
interest and be aware of the relationship between the witness and the
adult who is incapacitated.
Klotz encourages attorneys to conduct a background investigation into
the proposed guardian to make sure they meet the qualifications. Does
the guardian have the financial means and education needed to care for
this person? Klotz related a story of a case in which the potential
guardian was found to be a felon and could not be bonded.
“No one ever asked her if she was a felon. It was a mess. Check with
your bonding company, check credit ratings, bankruptcies and make sure
the guardian candidate understands the role and responsibilities of the
job,” she warned.
Alert the court to any accommodation needed by a witness such as an
interpreter, a hearing device or a video text display. Klotz reminds
attorneys that it may take time for the court to secure the needed
resources. She also advises attorneys to ask the court to keep witnesses
out of the courtroom.
“If it’s an in-person trial, you have to remember to have the court
exclude the witnesses from the courtroom before they testify because you
don’t want one witness influencing the other witnesses,” Klotz said.
During the Hearing: Standards, Evidence and Experts
The standard of proof in guardianship hearings is “clear and
convincing evidence,” which Klotz admits is a high standard. Attorneys
must present evidence that supports the allegation that an incapacitated
person cannot manage daily tasks, which include bathing, shopping and
making their own medical decision. One must prove that the person will
suffer harm without a guardian’s assistance in maintaining a home.
Finally, one must prove that the person cannot understand their
limitations.
“Lack of understanding here is key, the court requires proof that no
less restrictive form of assistance is available,” explains Klotz. “If
you want full guardianship, you have to show why this is needed and have
those arguments ready before you go to trial.”
If an expert witness is being presented, Klotz says they will need
extra preparation because they will be examined by attorneys from the
other side. Outline the witnesses’ qualifications, including education,
research and their connection to the case. They should be prepared to
answer how they become involved with the case and be able to detail
interactions with the incapacitated person.
“The other side is entitled to question the expert witness and once
the expert survives the voir dire, you can state the witness opinions on
the matter,” Klotz said.
The Elder Law and Special Needs Section will hold the fourth and final part of the series on guardianship on July 15.
By: Michelle Cera Andrew Ford Laura Wadsten Editor: Jim Impoco Sam Koppelman
They beat the walls.
Cheryle Weir couldn’t breathe, her roommate recalled. Dependent on
ventilators at an Ensign facility, they couldn’t talk. They couldn’t
scream.
So they banged on the table, banged on the wall, desperate for anyone to hear. A nurse should have been there. No one was.
Eventually, Cheryle stopped banging.
Her family’s lawsuit blames her death on The Ensign Group ($ENSG).
Ensign is America’s largest operator of “skilled nursing facilities”
(SNFs) — facilities designed to rehabilitate people who need less than
hospital care, but more care than they can provide themselves.
Ensign boasts about its star ratings, “industry-leading” clinical
outcomes, and “strong history of quickly improving the quality of care
in the facilities we acquire.” A sell-side analyst referred to Ensign’s
quality star ratings as part of its “secret sauce.” And Ensign says it
sets “the standard by which all others in our industry are measured.”
But a five-month Hunterbrook investigation found that standard is tragically low — and fatal.
The investigation revealed Ensign’s $10 billion empire is built on a
dubious foundation: Its profits are heavily dependent on understaffing
facilities. It performs better than average on self-reported quality
metrics but worse on independently verifiable measures. It regularly
violates state minimum staffing laws, and routes taxpayer dollars to its
executives and to its own affiliates. Meanwhile, Ensign patients suffer
and sometimes die.
“We could’ve had so much more time,” Weir’s daughter, Hanneka White, told Hunterbrook in an interview. “And it was taken away.”
One of Cheryle Weir’s daughters, Hanneka White, with a photo of her mother. Source: Hunterbrook Media
Hunterbrook Media’s reporting team — led by three journalists, as
well as former financial analysts from Goldman Sachs and Magnetar
Capital — examined millions of Center for Medicare & Medicaid
Services (CMS) datapoints, reviewed thousands of pages of documents, and
interviewed dozens of sources, including: attorneys, professors,
healthcare professionals, ombudsmen, data analysts, and public
advocates, as well as former employees of Ensign, residents of Ensign
facilities, and family members of Ensign residents.
Here’s the story:
Ensign’s profits can be traced to providing less
care than its patients need — and less care than it is meant to provide
based on the tax dollars it receives from the government.Government programs pay skilled nursing facilities based on “acuity level,” a measurement of how sick the residents are. Ensign says
it’s focusing on high-acuity people in order to increase its revenue,
the bulk of which comes from government programs. But then it staffs
many facilities below the levels needed to provide the care those
payment rates are calibrated to support. Using the formula from a 2025 peer-reviewed study,
Hunterbrook calculated a 5 million-hour gap between hours of nursing
care needed and hours actually provided at Ensign facilities between
July and November 2024, the period for which robust data is available.
“The difference between those two numbers is fraud,” opined Ernest Tosh,
an attorney who litigates nursing home abuse and neglect cases.
Hunterbrook estimates that closing that staffing gap would have cost
Ensign about $161 million during the period studied — or roughly $386
million annualized. That’s more than the company’s entire reported net
income that year of $298 million. Hunterbrook also found that the more a
facility profited from understaffing, the worse its health survey
scores, facility-reported incidents, complaint deficiencies, total
penalties, staff turnover, and staffing ratings.
The Ensign Effect. We found Ensign’s growth
strategy is to buy struggling nursing homes — then cut staff at those
facilities and bank the savings, all while claiming quality improves.
Ensign has rapidly built its $10 billion empire by rolling up distressed
nursing homes, claiming to transform them into “market leaders in
clinical quality.” But after Ensign acquires a facility, we found,
nursing hours fall. Hunterbrook tracked 161 facilities before and after
Ensign acquisition against roughly 15,000 other nursing facilities,
controlling for industry trends. Bottom line: The quality of the
facilities gets worse, not better, after Ensign acquires them.
Federal and state laws prohibit understaffing. Federal law
requires every Medicare- and Medicaid-funded nursing facility to keep
“sufficient nursing staff” to meet each resident’s needs. The sicker the
resident, the more staffing the law generally demands. Yet Hunterbrook
found no consistent relationship between how sick Ensign’s residents are
and how many hours it staffs. Four states where Ensign operates impose
numeric floors on the care that must be provided: California,
Washington, Tennessee, and Kansas. Our analysis of CMS records from 2020
through 2025 found Ensign facilities falling below the legal floors in
those states on more than 18,000 days cumulatively. “You have to staff
to meet the needs of residents, and that consistently does not happen,”
said Ed Dudensing, an elder-abuse attorney, describing insufficient
staffing. “That’s illegal.”
Ensign’s superior “star” ratings are largely built on an honor system the company appears to be gaming. The CEO emphasized Ensign facilities “outperformed industry peers in 5-Star Quality Measure results” in a recent press release.
He also highlighted “the highest quality clinical outcomes” in an
earnings call last year. What he didn’t mention is that those measures
are largely self-reported. We sorted CMS Provider Information
performance metrics into three tiers: independently verified by
unannounced government inspectors; self-reported but auditable via
payroll records; or self-assessed and self-reported with no imposed
documentation procedures. The result: Ensign performs worse when there
is external verification.
Ensign paid more than $339 million to its own affiliates in 2024. That’s about 8% of $ENSG revenue that year. The maneuver is known as tunneling.
Our cost-report analysis shows Ensign facilities pay hundreds of
millions of dollars a year to entities also owned or controlled by
Ensign. Think: Landlords. Insurance. Transportation. “Home office”
management fees. Hunterbrook found that, across the industry, more money
going to related parties correlates with fewer staffing hours, more
staff turnover, and lower health inspection scores, among other metrics.
A 2024 congressional letter
to Ensign’s then-executive chairman identified the industry practice as
a “deceptive tactic” to hide profit. In an interview, Tosh, the
attorney, shared his opinion of nursing homes tunneling money to related
parties without any effective oversight: “It’s just a huge menagerie of
corporations to hide the money movement. In effect it’s money
laundering.”
Former employees in different states described systematic misrepresentations. Fabricated
Google reviews; document falsification; falls downgraded to “slips;”
improperly upcoded patient acuity; and retaliation against staff who
refused to engage in these activities. Former employees also told
Hunterbrook they were compelled to provide unnecessary care and
exaggerate its duration. One former Ensign therapist described
higher-ups encouraging higher billing via falsifying minutes of therapy:
“The 30 would be erased and somebody would put in a 70.”
An industry lobbying group waged a multi-front campaign to kill a federal government rule meant to stop understaffing. In
February of 2026, the Trump Administration rescinded a Biden-era rule
setting a federal staffing minimum for nursing facilities, after the
American Health Care Association (AHCA), an industry group, sued the
government. Ensign and other operators backed a pro-Trump super PAC and Ensign gave $750,000 to MAGA Inc before the rule was rescinded. The now-defunct rule was estimated to save 13,000 lives a year.
Behind all the numbers, patients suffer and die. Thomas
Scates died after an Ensign facility neglected him, according to his
family. Herbert Howenstein died after a large pressure ulcer developed
at an Ensign nursing home. Six inches long, an inch deep, blackened dead
flesh, penetrating to muscle. An EMT report shows that facility staff
were aware but nobody was treating him for it. An expert reviewing his
death concluded, “The patient’s demise was almost merciful.” A nonverbal
resident with Alzheimer’s was found covered in ants with bites all over
her body — an infestation discovered by her family, not the staff,
according to an investigation report. Cheryle Weir died after begging
for help that did not come in time, her daughter told Hunterbrook. These
are just some of the stories Hunterbrook heard, which represent a
fraction of the devastation in Ensign facilities around the country.
Ensign did not respond to multiple detailed requests for comment from Hunterbrook. Ensign CEO Barry Port did, however, tell The Arizona Republic in 2023
that staffing is decided by individual facility management, and the
suggestion that his company siphons money to boost profit is
“categorically false.” Other statements by the company seem to
contradict that supposed distance between Ensign and its individual
facilities. In a recent earnings call, for example, Port cited access to patient-level data and involvement in facility-level decisions. The most recent 10-K
also suggested there was visibility over individual facilities: Ensign
said they use specialized software to help caregivers “more accurately”
capture services to “increase reimbursement,” and that the company had
“installed software and touch-screen interface systems in each
operation.”
If you or a loved one has been affected, or if you have any relevant information to share, please reach out at ideas@hntrbrk.com. This is part one of a series on Ensign and the industry.
“They’re The Model”
Most of us will require institutional care in our lifetime. We hope that care will be high quality.
Faced with an aging population and widespread nursing shortages,
every American nursing facility must contend with infections, falls, and
sometimes death. On an average day, a facility might smell like human
waste cut with cleaning products. Easy listening music covers the
croaking sounds of uncomfortable residents. Frontline staff do their
best at difficult and low-paying jobs, in facilities lit fluorescently
and decorated in liminal beige.
But Ensign has established something worse: a business model that
seems to depend on eroding care for America’s sick and elderly.
“To take away resources from that is, I don’t even think that’s bad management. I think that’s just evil greed.”
Robert love, Former cook at Tennessee Nursing Facility Acquired by Ensign
Our investigation shows the company boomed in recent years by rolling
up distressed homes, cutting high-skilled nursing staff, and gaming
metrics.
“They’re the model,” said David Kingsley, a retired professor at the
Kansas University Medical Center who researches corporations that depend
on revenue from Medicare and Medicaid.
Ensign operates the most CMS-certified nursing facilities in America, with 334 locations across 17 states. They offer more than 38,000 skilled nursing beds, according to a March filing.
But these facilities have problems — and they seem to get worse after
Ensign takes over. Conditions at several of its facilities are so
severe that they are candidates on CMS’s “Special Focus Facility” list,
a roundup of facilities with a pattern of serious problems that pose
risks to resident health and safety. Facilities on the SFF list are at
risk of being terminated from Medicare or Medicaid programs.
And Ensign is coming for more. In the second quarter so far, it has announced purchases of 17 facilities in Texas, two in Wisconsin, and one each in Iowa and California (real estate only).
Ensign’s model is working. It grew rapidly after its current CEO took
the helm in 2019. His $13.8 million in compensation last year — at a
company whose revenue is largely derived from public funds — was mostly
tied to company performance.
And Ensign does not limit incentive-based compensation to its senior
executives. Our investigation found that some individual facility
administrators are compensated the same way, creating powerful
incentives to cut costs. While it’s normal to have financial performance
incentives for cutting costs, it’s different when the incentive is to
cut nursing hours — the results can be a matter of life and death.
For example, a lawsuit deposition
shows the company tied a facility administrator’s bonus directly to
location profits, and by staffing below recommended levels, that
administrator was able to boost a roughly $400,000 annual bonus to more
than $800,000.
As a result of understaffing at that very same facility, the lawsuit
claims, a resident died, his final moments captured on a recorded phone
call provided to Hunterbrook:
One source, a forensic accountant, likened the industry to the Sackler family’s opioid profiteering.
A Huron County man charged with elder abuse in March now faces up to life in prison after prosecutors added a second-degree murder charge in connection with his mother's death.
Rebecca Wu, 53, was arrested last week along with er sister, Ingrid Wu, 52, for allegedly failing to properly care for their parents at a University City apartment. Rebecca pled not guilty on Tuesday. Ingrid entered the same plea on Monday. NBC 7's Allison Ash has the latest details on the case from the downtown courthouse.
A for-profit veteran benefits claim consultant told Kansas lawmakers the company’s operations were legal. A federal judge disagreed.
By: Grace Hills
OVERLAND PARK — A federal judge in
North Carolina found that Veterans Guardian, a for-profit consultant
that charges veterans for help filing their disability claims, violates
federal law.
The order came just a few months
after the company lobbied Kansas legislators to pass a bill that would
have greenlit for-profit consultants, despite concerns that the practice
may be unlawful. The bill almost became law but support for it crumbled apart in the final hours of the legislative session.
Proponents argued Feb. 3 before the
House Veterans and Military Committee that a few “bad actors” ruined the
for-profit consultants’ reputations by charging exorbitant fees and
using suspicious marketing tactics. Bill Taylor, co-founder of Veterans
Guardian, said House Bill 2214 would have reined those companies in.
“We are 100% in compliance with federal law,” Taylor testified to lawmakers in February.
In May, U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles disagreed.
Federal law
states “no individual may act as an agent or attorney in the
preparation, presentation, or prosecution of any claim,” unless they are
accredited — which Veterans Guardian and the other for-profit
consultants are not. Veterans who want help reviewing a claim can get
help from an attorney or claims agent in exchange for a fee, which could
include a portion of the veteran’s benefits.
Opponents have called the for-profit
consultants “claim sharks,” and argue that charging veterans thousands —
even tens of thousands — for a service that is offered for free by
accredited services is predatory.
Eagles’ order outlined how the Pinehurst, North Carolina-based Veterans Guardian charged the three plaintiffs between $1,880 and $21,360. The $21,360 fee was for an initial disability claim.
“The evidence is undisputed that
(Veterans) Guardian is not accredited, that on behalf of veterans it
prepares claims forms, that in those forms it presents disability claims
for decision by the (Veterans Affairs), and that it charges fees for
doing so,” Eagles wrote in her order. “These actions violate federal
law.”
Veterans Guardian was founded in
2017. The federal law Eagles cited has existed since long before then.
Veterans Guardian, and similar for-profit consultants, have operated
through a legal loophole.
An NPR investigation
found that in 2006, as the U.S. was at war with Iraq, Congress thought
veterans needed more options to navigate the disability claims process.
For-profit consultants repeat that rationale today — that veterans
deserve a choice between their paid, streamlined services or free but
more complex accredited ones.
That year, Congress stripped the
criminal penalties for violating the law — but kept the law on the
books. That meant companies like Veterans Guardian have been able to use
that loophole to continue operating without consequences.
Multiple bills have been introduced to reinstate the criminal penalties, but none has passed. Veterans Guardian has spent millions lobbying on the federal level. A federal bill similar to the Kansas one — that would allow for-profit consultants to legally charge veterans — advanced in the U.S. House.
After Eagles’ order, more congressional attempts at criminalization were introduced in the U.S. House and Senate. U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, D-Kansas, signed onto the legislation Monday, a spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for Republican U.S.
Sen. Jerry Moran, who chairs the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee,
didn’t provide a comment in time for this story.
Anthony Pierce, counsel to Veterans Guardian, said the company “strenuously disagrees” with the court’s ruling.
“The ruling is not final, and
Veterans Guardian will vigorously pursue all available avenues of appeal
to defend our work on behalf of disabled veterans,” Pierce said.
There is a calculation
that powerful people sometimes make when the victims of their decisions
are elderly. It goes like this: the families will grieve, the news cycle
will move on, and if you wait long enough, time does the work that
accountability never had to. For six years, the families of over 15,000 New Yorkers who died in nursing homes have been proving that calculation wrong.
That a letter was necessary tells you everything about where we are.
Every
person in a nursing home is someone's mother. Someone's father.
Someone's grandmother. They are not abstractions. They are people with
histories, with families, with someone who loved them. People who needed
care they could not get at home, and who trusted that the system
governing that care had standards worth the name. Andrew Cuomo knew
this. On March 24, 2020, he declared: "My mother is not expendable. And your mother is not expendable. And our brothers and sisters are not expendable."
Voices
for Seniors was founded six years ago by families who refused to accept
that calculation. We have testified before Congress and written to two
attorneys general. We have written op-eds, given interviews, made calls
and knocked on doors in Washington that were sometimes opened and
sometimes shut. We did all of this while grieving. Because we understood
early on what the powerful were counting on: that eventually, we would
stop.
If thousands
of children had died under these circumstances, if a directive had sent
infectious patients into facilities housing children, if the death count
had been falsified, if a cover-up had been documented line by line
before Congress, there would have been a commission. There would have
been prosecutions. There would have been the kind of reckoning that
follows tragedies where the victims are young and the public refuses to
look away.
Our loved ones were old. And someone calculated that their families might eventually move on.
The congressional letter sent today by Tenney is
not a legal filing. It will not compel the Department of Justice to
act. But it is a public declaration that the people elected to represent
New York's families have not forgotten either. And it matters, because
silence from the powerful only works when no one is watching.
We are watching. We
have been watching for six years. And we will keep asking is there one
standard of accountability in this country, or are there two: one for
the powerful, and one for everyone else?
The
families we represent know which answer they have been living with. Six
years of it. And they are still proving that calculation wrong.
Grief has a long memory. We haven't forgotten. And neither, we hope, will the Department of Justice.
Socialite Brooke Astor, who at age 104 had Alzheimer’s, had a son
who was convicted of 14 counts of elder abuse against her; now, her
grandson advocates for senior lawyers to recognize and challenge when
guardianship proceedings are protecting one’s legal rights or stripping
them away.
Guardianship can strip adults of nearly all legal rights through
procedures that fall below the constitutional standards applied to far
less consequential deprivations—a gap senior lawyers are positioned to
recognize and challenge.
The disability rights framework of supported
independence—scaffolding without confiscating sovereignty—offers a
principled standard for measuring whether the law is honoring or merely
managing human vulnerability.
Senior lawyers bring irreplaceable authority to guardianship reform:
professional credibility, lived proximity to aging, and the persuasive
precision of those who have insisted on reasoned process throughout
their careers.
The system worked. That is what has troubled me ever since.
In 2006, I petitioned a New York court to protect someone I loved—my grandmother, Brooke Astor,
then 104 years old. The court agreed. What I could not have fully
articulated at the time, and what I have spent the years since trying to
name, is this: The same system capable of protecting her was also
capable of erasing her by removing her rights. The difference was not
the law itself. It was who was present, who was credible, and who could
afford to persist.
You already know how to spot when due process is being honored and
when it is being performed. You have spent careers insisting on reasoned
findings, reviewable records, and procedural integrity. This piece asks
you to point that same professional discernment at a system you may not
yet have examined closely—and at a life stage that is no longer
abstract.
The System Lawyers Are Built to Question
Guardianship is widely understood as a protective remedy—a last
resort, carefully applied. In practice, it can operate as a near-total
reassignment of legal agency: control over residence, medical decisions,
finances, relationships, and access to courts transferred to a third
party, sometimes effectively permanently.
The doctrinal label is “protective.” But protection is a purpose, not a constitutional exemption.
When the interests at stake in other legal contexts are this
sweeping—civil commitment, termination of parental rights, major
deprivations of liberty—the system demands heightened procedural
protection and reviewable reasons. Guardianship touches interests at
least as foundational, and yet the procedural floor is often among the
lowest the civil system tolerates: truncated hearings, conclusory
findings, reliance on untested evaluations, and an appellate posture
that treats judicial discretion as self-justifying.
A right without a workable remedy is not a right in practice. It is
an aspiration. And the people most likely to need the remedy are often
least able to use it—lacking funds for independent counsel, unable to
initiate proceedings without access to communications or resources held
by the very guardian they would challenge, and facing health timelines
that outrun appellate calendars.
You recognize this pattern. You have argued against it in other courtrooms.
A Life-Course View that the Law Has Not Caught Up With
There is a structural gap in how the law thinks about personhood over time.
The law is strong in the middle—in the world of contracts, commerce,
torts, and ordinary civil procedure, where the idealized independent
adult is assumed. But the human life course does not stay in the middle.
It begins in dependency. It often returns to dependency. Disability
does not observe a schedule—it may be present from birth, arrive through
illness or injury, or accumulate gradually with age. If the law
protects autonomy only for the fully capable adult at full capacity, it
is not a code of justice. It is a code of convenience.
The disability rights movement understood this before elder law did.
Its core insight—that the problem is often not the person but the
environment, and that impairment is a reason to provide supports rather
than reduce rights—is the civil rights framework most explicitly built
around the human condition as it actually is: interdependent,
fluctuating, and embodied.
That framework has a name that is useful here: supported
independence. Not substituted judgment, where the system replaces the
person. And not only supported decision-making, which is already on the
books in a majority of states as a less restrictive alternative, though
chosen infrequently by courts, and tends to remain focused on the
transaction rather than the person. Supported independence adds the
relational dimension: the recognition that autonomy is not a solo
achievement but a shared one, sustained by the people and institutions
that surround us.
It is the proposition that the law should supply scaffolding without
confiscating sovereignty. That vulnerability is not a reason for erasure
but a reason for reinforced rights.
When the Preamble to the Constitution named among its founding
purposes the obligation to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves
and our Posterity,” the founders were not drafting a rule of decision.
They were naming what the whole enterprise of law is for—the frame
within which every code, every procedure, every adjudication should be
measured. Supported independence belongs in that tradition. It is not a
statute to be litigated or a mechanism to be administered. It is a
standard—and the question this piece puts to the profession is whether
the system we have built is finally ready to be measured against it.
What Senior Lawyers Already Know How to Read
This is not merely a philosophical aspiration. It has operational
content—and senior lawyers are among the best-positioned people in any
setting to recognize when it is being honored and when it is being
ignored.
Presume agency. Justify every restriction. You have argued
this in other contexts. The burden belongs on the system to prove the
necessity of limitations, not on the person to prove their worthiness of
rights they have never forfeited.
Offer supports before substituting judgment. Less restrictive
alternatives—advance planning instruments, supported decision-making
arrangements, limited financial assistance, care navigation,
community-based services—must be real options, not rhetorical gestures. A
system that names them without resourcing them has not offered an
alternative. It has described one.
Make findings specific and functional. Capacity is not
binary. A finding that someone “lacks capacity” without specifying what
they cannot do, which rights are affected, and why narrower measures are
insufficient is not a legal determination. It is a conclusion dressed
as one.
Records should be reviewable, and reasons should be transparent.
Confidentiality can be protected through proportionate means. Opacity
that forecloses accountability has not protected the person. It has
protected the proceeding.
Appoint counsel that is genuinely independent. Counsel that
is appointed but not resourced, present but not empowered, is a
procedural gesture. The person’s voice is not a gesture. It is the
constitutional center.
Make the exit real. Restoration cannot be mythical. Periodic
review, a meaningful path to modification or termination, and a
presumption that rights return when justification fades—these are not
generous additions to the system. They are what make it a legal system
rather than an administrative one.
Why This Audience, and Why Now
Joan Erikson’s contributions to the developmental model she built
alongside her husband Erik are too often absorbed into his name rather
than credited in her own. In her nineties, after Erik’s death, she
described what she called a ninth stage of life—an account of
vulnerability and trust at the far edge of experience. At its center she
placed gerotranscendence: a shift in very late life toward a
more expansive orientation, freed from what no longer matters. It
remains among the most courageous acts of scholarship in the field.
At its center is a question about trust—not the trust of infancy,
which is a question of caregivers, but the trust of late life, which is a
question of systems. Can I trust the institutions that claim to protect
me? Can I trust that help will not cost me myself?
For lawyers in the Senior Lawyers Division, this is not an
abstraction. It is either approaching or already present in the lives of
friends, spouses, siblings, clients, and—with honesty—ourselves. The
lawyer who has spent decades insisting on reasoned decision-making in
other contexts is in the best possible position to bring that same
insistence to this one.
Not from a podium. In conversation—at ABA gatherings, with family
members navigating a diagnosis, with colleagues whose clients are aging,
with journalists and legislators who have not yet heard the argument
made with professional precision by someone who has lived it from the
inside.
That is the generative move available to this audience. Not a new
doctrine for its own sake, but a more honest continuity between what the
law promises and what it actually delivers—to the clients you have
served, to the people you love, and eventually, if you are fortunate to
live long enough, to yourself.
The law’s highest function is not to manage human vulnerability. It is to honor it.
That is the kind of code worthy of the next 250 years.
Ann Cowan, a caregiver at Corinth Road Personal Care Home in Newnan, has been arrested and charged with two counts of exploitation and intimidation of disabled adults, elderly persons, and residents. The charges follow allegations of elder abuse, including leaving medication out of reach for a wheelchair-bound resident and assaulting an elderly man with dementia. Cowan is currently in jail with a bond set at $10,000. A former coworker who witnessed some of the alleged abuse hopes that coming forward will encourage others to do the same.
A California woman who worked as a registered nurse was charged with 77 felonies, including alleged elder abuse, theft and more.
Rosanne Marquis, 71, had been operating an unlicensed in-home health
care business in Santa Barbara, according to the Santa Barbara County
District Attorney’s Office.
While running the business, Marquis is accused of stealing from
“elderly dependent adults, including a veteran, and failed to both
supply accurate tax returns for her business, and to make required
deductions and payments to the Employment Development Department on
behalf of her employees for several years,” court documents said.
Although authorities have not disclosed how much money she reportedly
stole, court records obtained by the Santa Barbara Independent noted
that it totaled over $100,000.
Before she opened Rosanne Marquis HomeCare Service, the suspect
worked as a trauma nurse coordinator at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital.
She also previously served on the boards of the Council of Alcohol and Drug Abuse and the Alzheimer’s Women’s Initiative, the Santa Barbara Independent reported.
Marquis was arrested in April. On June 9, she was charged with 77
felonies in connection with the crimes. She remains out of custody on
bail.
The case was investigated by members of the Santa Barbara District
Attorney’s Office, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of
Inspector General, and the California Employment Development Department.
