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Elder Care Law and Guardianship Mediation
Mediation is an extremely effective tool to resolve family legal disputes involving the elderly. In the field of adult guardianship and elder law, almost all disputes involve families facing crisis during the decline of a loved one. Mediation is an excellent option for you and your family, including the loved one in need of assistance, to ask the hard questions, explore the care options together, and arrive at solutions that best suit your loved one’s and your family’s needs. You can use mediation to find solutions to the difficulties of caring for your mother, father, brother, sister, wife, husband, son, or other loved one.
In some cases, new, outside people are coming into a loved one’s life who may be overstepping boundaries or who have suddenly become a new addition to the will or potential owner of the family home. Other cases involve sibling misunderstandings regarding control of the loved one’s finances or even quality of life decisions or issues surrounding end of life decisions or durable powers of attorney. Even when people are working with the best of intentions, the vulnerable person’s resistance to losing control coupled with family dynamics and outside influences make such disputes ripe for divisiveness.
As attorneys and litigation enter people’s lives during these difficult times, it is easy to see the negative impact of the legal process on these volatile issues. It is important to be mindful of what can be done to minimize the emotional, mental, physical, and financial strain caused by the legal dispute. Mediation gives these type cases a real chance at a good outcome and can help build and repair relationships including the family relationship. In these kinds of cases the conflict falls outside the purely legal issues and therefore court-imposed solutions alone will fail. Mediation or a facilitated meeting will address the underlying causes of conflict in addition to the legal conflict and have the flexibility to reach workable solutions.
