Effects of Free and Targeted Legal Assistance on Financially Exploited Older Adults.

Abstract

Every year between 2.2% and 6.6% of older adults in the United States fall prey to different forms of financial exploitation (Deane, 2018). According to estimates, older adults lose approximately 2.9 USD billion of their personal wealth every year in financial exploitation to a broad range of individuals, including family members, contractors, and service providers (Wood & Lichtenberg, 2017). Financial exploitation of older adults has multidimensional impacts, including social, psychological, legal, financial, and familial (Navarro et al., 2013; Wood & Lichtenberg, 2017). Irrespective of these multidimensional impacts, legal interventions are the most commonly pursued solutions (Reed, 2005). Victims of financial exploitation can report the crime to police, which may lead to criminal charges, or they can file a civil lawsuit seeking return of their stolen money or property (Reed, 2005). Because the legal process in civil and criminal proceedings is often lengthy, complex, and costly, involving long paper trails, and analyses of contracts, most cases end with neither financial recovery nor conviction of a perpetrator (Andres, 2015; Hafemeister, 2003). There are physical and cognitive health problems associated with older adults that may impact decisions of whether or not to pursue criminal or civil remedies or to even report the incident to law enforcement (Shao et al., 2019). For cases that involve small sums of money and clients with limited resources, the barriers to obtaining civil legal representation are significant. Since these cases are resource-intensive, contingent based, and require special expertise in dealing with older adults, private attorneys tend to avoid taking up such cases (Andres, 2015; Hafemeister, 2003). If victims cannot find or afford a private attorney willing to take their case, often the only remaining option available to them is publicly funded legal services organizations. These services, nationwide, lack adequate resources to handle all the legal needs of the communities, forcing prioritization of cases that are not overly burdensome and most likely to result in a positive resolution for their clients (Culley &