Preparing for Life's Events
Life-altering events like significant illness, freak accidents, or other kinds of impairments can unexpectedly impact your practice. While it’s hard to think about the unpredictable happening, it can happen to any one of us at any time. We’re here to help you prepare as well as to help you handle the expected. The following resources can help with both.
Planning ahead important. A life-altering event can impact your practice, clients and family. We're here to guide you with planning and to help if trouble strikes.
1. Line-Up Personal, Practical, and Emotional Help.
Support from others is crucial. Now is the time to ask others to lean in. Here are some free and confidential resources offered through the bar:
- Lawyers Helping Lawyers is a free and confidential service connecting you with a peer who has experienced a similar situation and care share knowledge, emotional support, and connect you with resources.
- Phone: (801) 900-3834
- Email: contact@lawyershelpinglawyers.org
- Click here for LHL website
- Tava Health: offers 6 FREE and CONFIDENTIAL therapy sessions for active, US based, Utah licensees (and Paralegal division members). Sign up here (insurance and/or other payment methods only used for sessions after the 6 free sessions).
2. Form a Care Team.
If your life-altering event is medically related, you likely already have a medical professional in your corner. Expand your care team early on to include a patient navigator, case worker, or social worker who can answer questions, offer support, and direct you to resources to address the physical, emotional, and logistical impacts of treatment. Ask your provider about what they offer for patient and family support. The following links can also help.
3. Get Insurance in Place and Identify Your Financial Resources.
If a life-altering event happens understand early on the costs of treatment, available insurance coverage, access to short or long-term disability benefits, and any timelines required for life insurance designations.
4. Get Appropriate Care Directive and Estate Documents in Place.
Get the medical care you want, avoid unnecessary suffering, and relieve caregivers of confusion and decision-making burdens during moments of crisis or grief by preparing or reviewing the documents that dictate your estate and care directives. Find a Utah attorney to help here. Free help and information is also available online through the following resources.
- Free resources can be found through the website for the Utah Courts. Probate and life-planning resources can found here . An Online Court Assistance Program for filling out Guardianship and Conservatorship forms can be found here. They also offer a 30-minute Advance Life Planning and Guardianship Online Training Program that discusses:
1) Planning ahead and alternatives to guardianship
2) Health care decision making
3) Financial decision making
4) Making a plan and finding resources - The American Bar Association Commission on Law and Aging has a Tool Kit for Health Care Advanced Planning that contains a variety of self-help worksheets, suggestions, and resources to assist in having informed, thoughtful reflection about your wishes and values, and personal communication between you and your likely decision-makers before a crisis occurs.
- Utah Legal Services has free information about Power of Attorneys, Probate, how to avoid Probate, and how to draft a simple holographic will.
- Utah’s Aging Services offers free information, instructions, and forms on the Utah Advance Health Care Directive, the
Utah Provider Order for Life Sustaining Treatment (POLST). help with and of Life Conversations, and a 3-part video by a doctor and estate planning attorney discussing these documents and how to use them. It can be found here.
5. Succession Planning and Important Ethics, and Malpractice Information for Lawyers, Law Firms, and Legal Employers.
Craig and Nancy Johnson wish to thank the law firm of Parsons, Behle & Latimer, the MLC Insurance Agency, the Utah State Bar, the Utah State Bar's Estate Planning Section, Utah's Lawyers Helping Lawyers and the dedicated members of the working group that donated many hours of effort toward this important initiative.
