Law Office of Donald D. Vanarelli Blog

On Saturday, April 27, 2013, I presented a session on the impact of elder law issues on divorce mediation at the 2013 Annual Divorce Mediation Seminar by the New Jersey Association of Professional Mediators. The topics covered in my session included Social Security, including retirement, disability and survivors benefits, Supplemental Security Income benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, [...]

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Recently, the New Jersey Supreme Court granted a Petition for Certification I filed asking the Court to review a decision of the appellate division denying a request by my client, a retired fireman, to designate as beneficiary of his public pension death benefits a special needs trust he established in his Last Will and Testament. This [...]

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The New Jersey Supreme Court has directed that the Court’s function in construing a decedent’s will is “to ascertain and give effect to the ‘probable intention of the testator.’” Fidelity Union Trust Co. v. Robert, 36 N.J. 561, 564 (1962) (further citations omitted). This function applies to the enforcement of the testator’s intent regarding testamentary [...]

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A California appeals court ruled that a trial court inappropriately awarded trustee fees to the successor trustee of a special needs trust despite clear language in the trust prohibiting a successor trustee from receiving a fee. As a result, the trustee did not receive any of his fees that had totaled over six figures. Thorpe v. [...]

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The New Jersey Hospital Care Payment Assistance Program, commonly called “Charity Care,” is a state program for New Jersey residents with low income and resources who have no health insurance and are not eligible for programs like Medicaid and NJ FamilyCare. There are many people in New Jersey who have no insurance or health benefits [...]

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The parties in this case had a brief relationship which resulted in the birth of a daughter. Several months prior to the child’s birth, defendant/father, Marcos Cozze, Jr., was in a devastating motor vehicle accident which resulted in permanent brain damage. A lawsuit was filed on defendant’s behalf. More than three (3) years later, a [...]

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(The 15th Annual Elder and Disability Law Symposium was held on October 3, 2012 at the New Jersey Law Center, in New Brunswick, NJ. This year, as in the past few years, I gave the case law update at the opening plenary session by summarizing the top ten (10) or so elder and disability law [...]

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For the past several years, I have represented Thomas Saccone, a retired Newark, NJ firefighter with a severely disabled adult child named Anthony. Anthony lives with his parents, is unable to work, has been found to be totally disabled by the Social Security Administration, and for many years has received Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and [...]

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A New Jersey appeals court recently affirmed a trial court judgment dividing the assets remaining in a supplemental needs trust established for a deceased adult child with special needs between the child’s parents even though the biological father was a “deadbeat dad,” paying no child support, contributing nothing to his daughter’s medical care and visiting [...]

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In a recent precedential decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Judicial Circuit held that laws passed by the State of Pennsylvania designed to regulate special needs trusts (SNT) which placed greater restrictions on the SNTs than were contained in federal law governing SNTs “transgress[ed] federal intent” and were preempted by federal [...]

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