Attorney Lisa M. Foy billed the state for her conservator services after the conserved person’s death and reported income or state benefits for deceased persons, according to a loss report by the Auditors of Public Accounts that contained a July 11, 2025, letter from the Office of the Probate Court Administrator that found the attorney had violated several rules of professional conduct.
The letter indicated the Office of the Probate Court Administrator held a meeting with Foy in May to review five conservator matters pending before the court and determined that Foy had overbilled for deceased individuals in the amount of $10,950. Further review by both Foy and the Probate Court Administrator found Foy had billed a total of $22,995 for which she was not entitled to compensation.
“The Office of the Probate Court Administrator’s review of your billing practices has revealed a pattern of billing for matters in which the protected persons have been deceased and cases in which you billed the full conservator rate when you were entitled to only one-half as a professional co-conservator,” Chief Counsel Heather L. Dostaler wrote in the letter to Foy. “In addition, there appears to be a pattern where you failed to timely notify the courts of the death of the conserved person, sometimes for years, and there were fee waivers signed under penalty of false statement on which you reported income after the person’s death.”
Several days later Dostaler sent a letter to both the State Auditors of Public Accounts and Connecticut Comptroller Sean Scanlon informing them the Office of the Probate Court Administrator had “become aware of possible unauthorized, illegal, irregular or unsafe handling or expenditure of state or quasi-state agency funds,” and that Foy was “working cooperatively” to “resolve the billing and overpayment issues.”
According to the Comptroller’s open records website, Foy received a little more than $118,000 in state payments in 2025, with most of those payments for conservator services, and received more than $137,000 in 2024.
Reached for comment, Foy says she discovered the overpayments in April and attributed the billing errors to the fact that she was balancing hundreds of conservatorships under a contract with the state that requires conservators to submit billing on a spreadsheet quarterly, which then goes through four levels of court and administrative review – all of which apparently missed her overpayments.
“We have in the probate system, there’s four levels of review because they understand how navigational it is,” Foy said. “In good faith, obviously, I paid it back, there was no question.”
“We check them, but we’re not perfect,” Foy said. “I’m not excusing it, because it was a mistake, but there’s a lot of people who have done this, just in the course of trying to do it.”
According to both Foy and the Probate Office’s letter, Foy voluntarily went back in her records to 2018, the year the state switched from hourly billing to quarterly, to find any other discrepancies. The Probate Office, as well, conducted a further review, which she says took “months” during which she was unpaid for her previous work.
Foy also says that in the cases in which she was co-conservator, but billed as if she were the sole conservator, she was unsure how to bill the state for her services. “I was like half rate conservator, and I didn’t even know how to bill that, so I reimbursed them for that,” Foy said.
In 2019, 77-year-old Ruth Strong successfully appealed a Probate Court decision, claiming Foy did not handle Strong’s funds properly and left her liable for unpaid bills to the nursing home where Strong was placed. The 2021 decision by Judge Cesar Noble overturned the Probate Court’s approval of Foy’s financial accounting and indicated that Strong could pursue litigation against Foy.
“Foy’s actions resulted in the financial ruin of the woman she (and the probate court) were charged with protecting,” Marilyn Denny, an attorney with the Connecticut Legal Rights Project who represented Strong, said in a 2021 press release.
Strong pursued additional claims against Foy in a separate 2020 court case claiming breach of fiduciary duty, negligence, false imprisonment, and infliction of emotional distress and seeking over $200,000 in damages. However, a jury sided with Foy in a 2023 decision.
Foy says that prior to this accounting issue she had informed the Probate Office that she was leaving the conservatorship practice, although she had to continue handling the cases she was already assigned until the courts appointed new conservators, and she spent much of that time going without pay. Foy says that after fifteen years working as a conservator, she has changed jobs.
“I want to get back into what I used to do,” Foy said. “I started resigning in May, so it took the courts a good six months [to find new conservators] because no one really wants to do the work, and I wasn’t going to give up on my conserved people.”
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Connecticut conservator billed state for deceased persons
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