CLIENT ALERT: What legal documents do I need BEFORE my child becomes seriously ill?(1)
If a student becomes seriously ill parents need to immediately lawyer up to become their child’s legal representative. Thus, parents should immediately contact us to obtain:
A healthcare directive: We draft a legal document where your child makes powerful decisions—including whether to be resuscitated—and which family member makes those decisions when the child is no longer conscious. Getting this directive signed, now, saves the family an entire trial while their child is brain dead and on a respirator. (2).
A durable power of attorney: We draft a legal document where your child names someone to be his legal representative for any number of transactions that need to take place while your child is ill and unable to do them. An enormous number of your child’s every day activities require a legal power of attorney in his absence. For example, if you need to trace where your child got infected with COVID-19, you will need access to cell phones and social media. (3). You can only do that with a trial or with a power of attorney. You also need a power of attorney, to talk to banks (4), to talk to employers, insurance carriers, to the financial aid office (5), to lenders like Sallie Mae, and to current as well as future schools.
A series of HIPAA releases: Without your children’s HIPAA waiver you cannot talk to their doctors. (6). You also cannot talk to their school health centers. You cannot talk to their drug stores, their therapists and their optometrist. Securing HIPAA releases is laborious but it empowers the parent to take care of the child during an emergency.
Raul Jauregui
Jauregui Law Firm
I am an attorney and I defend mostly respondents of sexual misconduct in colleges or universities. This is absolutely not my legal opinion or my legal advice, but rather, suggestions on how to protect your family’s college students in this Coronavirus national emergency. If you’re in this situation, in any way, consult a lawyer now.
As posted in Quora:
ENDNOTES:
1. We’re trying to provide optimal tools for parents in extraordinarily dangerous times for students and parents. COVID-19, also known as Coronavirus disease, has caused an unprecedented shut down of substantially all the U.S.’s educational system because students were infecting each other. See, e.g, https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/key-messages-and-actions-for-covid-19-prevention-and-control-in-schools-march-2020.pdf?sfvrsn=baf81d52_4
2. The Mayo Clinic has an extensive description of the horrible decisions that a patient needs to make or else have an agent to make. Absent a healthcare directive the patient’s agent picks between options. With a healthcare directive the agent does what the patient chose to do while still conscious. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/consumer-health/in-depth/living-wills/art-20046303
3. In an age of hacking, the I-phone or Droid of an unconscious patient is as impregnable to their loved ones as it is to a hacker. A power of attorney breaches these defenses and thus provides profound help in the midst of terrible loss. See, e.g, https://www.gillware.com/data-recovery-services/accessing-deceased-loved-ones-data/
4. See, e.g, https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/what-is-a-power-of-attorney-poa-en-1149/
5. See, e.g., https://www.usa.gov/features/navigating-power-of-attorney-how-to-help-loved-ones-manage-their-money
6. HIPAA releases need to be school-specific. See for example, Drexel’s policy: https://drexel.edu/cpo/privacy/privacy-policies/privacy-policy-IM-06/, UPenn’s policy: https://www.upenn.edu/oacp/privacy/penndata/hipaa-faqs.html, and Villanova’s policy: https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/hr/policies/university/privacy.html