Bet Tzedek Legal Services, Los Angeles

Elder Law Specialists

Janet Morris, Ben Diehl & Debra Bierman
Elder Law Attorneys

Bet Tzedek Legal Services is a non-profit, public interest law center which provides free legal services to low-income residents of Los Angeles County. Bet Tzedek means "House of Justice" in Hebrew. Bet Tzedek serves persons of all racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds.

Interviewer: What is the state of elder care law?

Ben: It kind of depends on the particular issue that you've been talking about. What we look at, Debra and I, is a lot of situations involving financial abuse of seniors. What we see most typically is transactions where senior citizens are often wrongfully taken out of their homes or get put into abusive mortgages where brokers, lenders, salesmen, and sadly, family members will often try to take advantage of what their parents or grandparents have worked so hard for.

Interviewer: Debra, how could anybody take advantage of elders who, you know, can't defend themselves? What kind of people do that? What is this?

Debra: There's a whole business around it. There's a whole business around taking advantage of seniors. They're very easy targets and seniors are easy to identify, for instance a broker or somebody can find out how long someone's owned a house and if they have owned it for about 50 years the odds are it's a senior that owns it. And they actually look for that. And they have computer databases that actually track, and target and identify senior citizens to advertise to.

So they're business people. If you ask them, they're business people.

Interviewer: What do you guys do to protect seniors?

Janet: Well, one thing I do is educate seniors a lot about what they can do to protect themselves and how they can have their wishes made known in the future. And one way to do that is by executing powers of attorney for healthcare, and powers of attorney for finances. And those are legal document whereby they can state who they want to perform duties for them, to manage their finances, and make healthcare decisions for them in the future.

There are some problems with that though, because a power of attorney for finances, for example, can be used for good and for evil. It can be used for good if they decide that they want to choose someone to handle their finances. As long as they trust them, it's all fine. However, if they pick somebody who's not trustworthy, that person can then have total control over their finances and they could find themselves in an abusive, financially abusive situation.

So it's a little bit difficult to be an elder law attorney because you have to look at all the ethical considerations and all the possibilities, and inform your clients, make sure they understand what the possibilities are and make sure they're competent when they're signing the documents and that they think very clearly about who they're choosing to be their surrogates in the future.

Next: Legal questions surrounding caregiving