If you're thinking about pursuing a conservatorship for a loved one in your local Connecticut Probate Court and you're trying to figure out how much the whole process is going to cost, don't forget to include a bill from your loved one's "court-appointed attorney".
Connecticut law says that whenever a conservatorship application is filed in regards to a presumably incapacitated person (known as the "respondent") then the Court has to appoint an attorney to represent that person to make sure that he/she has an advocate in the process. That attorney is usually picked off of a list of attorneys with plenty of probate experience that the Court maintains. This is assuming that the person doesn't have the mental capacity to go out and get his own attorney.
The attorney's job is to meet with his client, explain the conseratorship process, advise the client on how to proceed and then zealously advocate for whatever position the client ultimately takes. In other words, it's just like any other attorney-client relationship...including the part about the attorney submitting a bill for legal services.
Most people are told up-front by the Court staff that there's a $150 application fee. But the arrival of a bill from the Court-appointed attorney usually comes as a surprise.
Granted, it's probably not the biggest legal bill you'll ever receive. For the time the attorney must spend in traveling to the client and having a consultation, drafting and submitting a report to the Court and then attending the hearing to appoint a conservator the bill may be in the $500 range, probably a little less. That's what you can expect for a non-contested matter. However, if the situation is more complicated because some family members are kicking off World War III over the conservatorship application, then the attorney will obviously have to spend more time on the file, which raises the legal fee.
In any case, you and the rest of the family will need to be prepared for the Court-appointed attorney's bill. And the money to pay for that bill comes from the pocket of the presumably incapacitated person, unless he doesn't have the financial means to do so, in which case the attorney submits the bill to Probate Court Administration at a greatly-reduced hourly fee.
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Posted by: generic viagra | April 07, 2010 at 04:04 PM
While in Los Angeles County, PVP attorneys(court appointed attorneys) no longer pay a fee to be on the court's list, many families are surprised by pvp fees. In many cases, the fee awarded to the PVP is paid by the County, if the estate has no assets. Where the estate has assets, the pvp fee in Los Angeles is normally paid from the conservatorship estate.
Mina Sirkin
http://SirkinLaw.com
Posted by: Mina Sirkin | February 08, 2011 at 12:17 AM
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