Case File 003 — How To Vet A Medicaid Attorney: The Five Questions Most Families Forget To Ask

Estate law and elder law are different specialties — licensed differently, tested differently, billed differently. Most state bars require neither specialty for the other, which means a lawyer can practice estate planning for thirty years and never file a single Medicaid application. The credentials look identical on a website. The Helen file is the cleanest illustration: an attorney who handled the family's wills competently for two decades was, on the Medicaid question, simply outside his trade.

Filing history is what the rule respects, not the relationship. The Council's five-question vetting set is built around one signal: how many Medicaid applications has this attorney filed in the last twelve months. Below ten is a flag. Below three is a stop. The Phoenix file shows what the right answer looks like — forty-seven filings in the prior year, the state penalty divisor named to the dollar, CELA certified since 2009. Twelve minutes was enough to know.

CELA certification through the National Elder Law Foundation is the only nationally recognized elder law credential. Pair it with the four patterns that keep surfacing in the files that work — concrete numbers in answers, a paralegal dedicated to Medicaid filings, malpractice insurance that explicitly names Medicaid planning, and a refusal to begin without sixty months of financial records on the table — and the families who run that check end up with applications approved on first review. Helen's family paid $11,000 for a trust that did exactly what it was designed to do, and nothing the family actually needed. The Phoenix family paid for a vetting hour before they paid for a retainer.