You might say Avery Mayne’s first elder law client was her law review, the Marquette Elder’s Advisor. As editor-in-chief her 3L year, she found herself fighting for its existence. “It was probably my first experience doing some real advocacy,” she told me.

Mayne has built on that experience to continue advocating for those whose welfare is threatened.

I’m interviewing elder law attorneys around the state to find out why and how they started practicing elder law, what their practices are like, and what they achieve for their clients. My first interview was with Blaine Patino. Like Blaine, Avery Mayne is outgoing (“I tend to be on the louder side,” as she put it) and loves spending every day helping the underdog.

Marquette Law School and the Marquette Elder’s Advisor

Mayne graduated from Marquette Law School in 2015. Being from Chicago, she liked Milwaukee and could see herself living there. It helped that the law school was beautiful, too.

Growing up, Mayne had always thought of being a lawyer. Her mother’s best friend was a lawyer. She knew she wanted to be in a helping career – “on the ground, helping individuals” as she puts it. She made the final decision to take the LSAT her junior year in college while studying abroad in Leon, France, inspired by an INTERPOL leader she admired.

Mayne enjoyed law school, though she wasn’t always interested in the required courses (she mentioned Constitutional Law and Civil Procedure, specifically). After toughing it out her 1L year, her second and third years were much better. She got to pick the courses that interested her. And in particular, she became editor, then editor-in-chief, of the social welfare law journal.

Named the Marquette Elder’s Advisor when Mayne joined, the journal was started by Allison Barnes, a longtime elder and disability professor at Marquette. It is now the Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review, with the broad subject of public interest law. It features articles about government, lobbying, employment law, health care law, HIPAA, and, of course, public benefits.

Mayne started as a regular staff editor during her 2L year and was then voted editor-in-chief for her 3L year. Two weeks before classes began, however, she learned that a new professor-advisor was going to push the law review in a very different direction. This threatened the existence of the journal – the professor had a poor relationship with the law school government, which was looking to shut down a journal and close a gap in the budget.

Mayne fought for the journal’s existence. She and the other editors had to distance themselves from the new professor-advisor and advocate for themselves. The issue was put to a vote before all the tenured professors. Her first experience with advocacy, ​“it was very dramatic to be trying to keep a journal alive,” says Mayne.

The journal garnered a lot of support from women professors; it tended to attract women students, according to Mayne.​ Seeing the professors argue over the journal was fascinating. Ultimately, Mayne and the other editors’ advocacy succeeded. The journal survived, widened its focus somewhat, and became what it is now.

After Law School

After graduating, Mayne immediately began practicing elder law at a boutique estate planning firm. She had been fortunate to make a connection during her first year of law school at networking events put on by the Association for Women Lawyers, and the timing worked out.

Mayne began clerking at the firm in the middle of her 3L year, and continued part time while studying for the Illinois bar exam during the summer. She has since maintained her Illinois admission since, and has had a number of cases involving guardianship transfers. Upon admission, she began practicing full time.

Her case load was at first equal parts family law, estate planning, and elder law. After three years, she shifted to practicing nearly all elder and special needs law. She hadn’t enjoyed traditional family law – the clients and issues didn’t resonate. And the firm had plenty of other attorneys doing full-time estate planning but not elder law, producing plenty of referrals for Mayne’s elder and special needs law focus.

“I don’t need the estate planning piece to keep myself busy,” says Mayne. “There are a lot of great estate planners who only want to do estate planning.” It would be a lot, she adds, to try to keep on top of all the elder law changes ​and estate planning changes.

Mayne’s Current Practice

Now at von Briesen & Roper, Mayne does no traditional estate planning – she does not draft typical wills or revocable trusts or administer estates. Instead, about half her practice is what she calls “litigation-lite” – guardianship, protective placement, and some elder abuse litigation. The other half is Medicaid and special needs planning.

Mayne is thankful for the referrals from attorneys who focus on estate planning only, and thinks it’s OK for them to focus on just that. The lawyers she works with know when to bring her in for elder law issues. They also know the value of adding provisions that allow Medicaid and special needs planning to powers of attorney, which Mayne appreciates. There is a limit to what a non-elder law attorney should attempt, though: “I think when estate planners start to add irrevocable trusts for [Medicaid-specific] asset protection, that’s when we start to see issues.”

A Typical Day

Mayne’s typical day sees her in the office 9-to-5-ish. Many days, she has a board or committee meeting before or after those hours. While in the office, the phone seems to be constantly ringing with clients who are getting notices and have questions or who have lots of family dynamics going on.

Mayne can usually limit client meetings to one or two each day. She keeps Fridays free of client meetings entirely. Between all the phone calls and meetings, she tries to get her “actual” work done. A lot of that ends up getting done after business hours or on weekends, though – especially document drafting.

Mayne’s clients are all dealing with some sort of family issue. Sometimes she helps a son or daughter acting under a power of attorney or a community spouse of someone who needs long-term care. A decent amount of the time, she works directly with the person who receives benefits. For example, she saw many people with disabilities – mentally competent – who realized they needed a lawyer as the pandemic public health emergency ended.

Personality

As for Mayne’s personality, she’s fairly outgoing. “I tend to be on the louder side,” she says. “We have to use our voices to deal with agencies who are not kind to our clients and are not easy to work with.” For example, Mayne can’t even recall the last time she called Milwaukee Enrollment Services and actually talked to a human being. She is also in court fairly often. So having a loud voice, being outgoing and vocal – it helps.

She also empathizes with clients, and sees the humor even in serious situations – essential qualities for any elder law attorney. “You have to be an empathetic person to work in this area,” she says. “You have to appreciate how overwhelmed or confused the client is and try to diffuse those feelings.”

Mayne clearly enjoys practicing elder law. She never really considered other practice areas or doubted that this is the right one for her. She noted that she feels strongly and personally about the issues her clients face.

Advice

To practice elder law, Mayne says you need to be organized. “I get the sense that all of us have a high volume of cases we’re working on,” she says. So you have to be organized, especially so you can be responsive to your clients.

If you are in a firm and have staff, you also have to be good at delegating and training. For the first five years of her practice, Mayne worked without a true paralegal. Then she had a “rockstar” paralegal for about three years who eventually moved on, and then she trained up a new one. Still, delegating is always a challenge, she admits: “I like things done the way I like them done.” But she tries to give anything that is not time-sensitive to an associate or paralegal first, to get them as much experience as possible. She recommends equipping them with examples and resources.

Mayne recommends elder law to anyone looking for an area of practice with a good balance between advocacy and transactional work, good work-life balance, and great clients. “This is the area of law to be in,” she says. “You can get all that and be happy with your career. It’s super rewarding to help the underdog – that’s really what we’re doing every day.”

It also helps that the elder law bar is friendly. “Not every bar has such a collegial community, where people are not competitive,” says Mayne. “It makes it really easy to come into this area.”

This article was originally published on the State Bar of Wisconsin’s Elder Law and Special Needs Blog. Visit the State Bar sections or the Elder Law and Special Needs Section webpages to learn more about the benefits of section membership.