When I explain to friends that I do a lot of work for professional guardians, my friends often don’t know what to make of it. The thought of someone getting paid to make decisions for an unrelated person is foreign to them. My friends have seen the Netflix movie or read scandalous stories about professional guardians ripping off vulnerable people. How could guardianship be a business?

This question may arise from a traditional understanding of family. When a person’s dementia progresses, or when a person’s mental illness lands a person in a psychiatric unit, family is expected to address the crisis.

What if family doesn’t exist, and a person has no surviving spouse or parent or child or sibling? What if family exists, but lives far away, busy with their own lives, raising their own families? What if family exists but is estranged because the issues at the root of the crisis have caused deep rifts? What if family exists and family members have contributed to the crisis by stealing money or living with but not caring for the family member in crisis? What if family members don’t agree on the solution to the crisis, and blame each other for causing it and accuse each other of trying to profit from it? In elder law, “family” often doesn’t fit its traditional definition and the expectations that trail it.

The absence of family or abuse or conflict within family creates a space that professional guardians often fill. Two siblings fight about who should care for mom, and the court looks for someone outside of the toxic family dynamic to make decisions for mom. A hospital dealing with a demented patient who lives alone and who has no known relatives calls a professional guardian to learn if it is willing to be the patient’s guardian. An adult child who lives out of town visits mom for the holidays and realizes that things are worse than she thought, that mom needs help, and that she can’t be mom’s guardian and raise her own kids and work. These circumstances arise again and again and the need for a non-family member to make decisions for another person is great.

Professional guardians bring rich experience with them when they fill this need. They have worked with people suffering from mental illness or dementia. They are familiar with care facilities and other care resources for their clients. Professional guardians know how to manage and account for someone else’s money, and how to get someone’s bills paid and taxes filed. Professional guardians know how hospitals work. They are used to getting yelled at, and answering the same question over and over, and saying no and being the bad guy. Professional guardians, in prior cases, have already managed circumstances which we might view as utter catastrophe.

And they cost money. Sometimes a professional guardian costs a lot of money because they charge by the hour and the person they are trying to protect is prone to crisis, or surrounded by conflict. The source of the professional guardian’s fees is the person whom the professional guardian has been appointed to protect. That person, by definition, is incapacitated. These circumstances can create skepticism. Is the guardian caring for or making a living from its client? Is it possible to do both?        

The best of my professional guardian clients go to great lengths to understand and advocate for the needs and desires of their clients. They answer the phone after hours and go to the hospital on weekends for their clients. Their clients may call incessantly to complain and my clients take the calls and keep doing their jobs and they don’t quit. My clients find answers to problems that I thought were unanswerable, and they take cases which begin in incredible conflict and they guide these cases into calm waters. Professional guardians serve an essential need in elder law, a need that family can’t meet.