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The Estate Planning Clinic provides direct client representation on estate planning and probate, guardianship, debt counseling, and private insurance cases. The Clinic offers estate and permanency planning services to low- and middle-income individuals in our community, specializing in serving people living with HIV/AIDS, the disabled and the elderly. The Clinic helps clients maximize control over decision-making and secure their children’s future in the event of incapacity or death through the drafting of wills, trusts, powers of attorney, health care proxies, funeral planning directives, living wills, guardianships and relationship agreements. The Clinic also assists survivors and family members in probating the estates of deceased clients.
Student work in the Clinic involves extensive client interviewing and counseling, and often requires frequent communications and negotiations with medical providers, employers and their human resources departments, creditors and insurance companies. Students work closely with clients to develop comprehensive estate plans, analyze government and private insurance benefits, assess clients’ financial situations and when necessary provide debt counseling and bankruptcy services. Estate Planning Clinic guardianship and contested estate probate cases involve representing clients at hearings before state probate court judges.
Students wishing to enroll in this clinic must enroll in the Health, Disability and Estate Planning: Law and Policy Clinical Workshop A (fall) or B (spring). The workshop brings together students who are working in direct services clinics (Disability Law and Estate and Permanency Planning Law) and the health law and policy clinic to explore the important links between legislative and regulatory policy making and implementation, on one hand, and the complex on-the-ground consequences of those policies, on the other.
For more information on the Estate Planning Clinic, contact Visiting Clinical Instructor Tamara Kolz Griffin at tkolz@law.harvard.edu or (617) 390-2530.
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