by Benjamin Scott Wright
August 18, 2026
About ten years and four children ago, I opened the cover of the perfect self-help book: Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Like many others, my wife and I proceeded to heap our bric-a-brac on the floor, get rid of most of it, and change how we think about acquiring stuff for the rest of our lives. Though Kondo’s claim that “none of my clients ever relapse” was absolute puffery—as my wife and four children can attest—I still believe her book represents the platonic ideal of the small, practical book that gives you knowledge and empowers you to get something done.
Tidying Up makes a promise—that following Kondo’s method of tidying will change your life—and delivers on it. It is a small book, attractive in its format, layout, and typography; inviting and unintimidating. Its chapters are short, containing nothing extraneous. Somehow, this very brief book feels like it left nothing out. You can scan it easily and read it quickly. It is easy to reference and find the section you need. It has illustrations placed judiciously, just where they are needed.
What I love about Tidying Up is that it is perfectly helpful while also being short and easy to read. That is a difficult thing to pull off in a book, and rare. Few such books are made for the general public; fewer are made for lawyers.
Perfectly helpful books for lawyers
For examples in the latter category, a couple that come to mind are Making Your Case and Butterick’s Practical Typography. The former was written by Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner, great legal writers who disagreed politically but found common ground editorially. It is pithy, containing 115 maxims on oral and written argument in 206 pages. Each point is succinctly stated and explained. Each page packs a punch. Small wonder for a book written by two such ruthless editors.
But my favorite example of a useful book for lawyers is Butterick’s Practical Typography. Originally titled Typography for Lawyers, Matthew Butterick—an attorney and designer in California—revised it for a general audience and published the entire book online at practicaltypography.com, where it is available for free.
To say the book is forward-thinking is an understatement. Butterick describes the online book as an experiment in delivering the same “level of writing and design quality that you’d find in a printed book” on the web. He created his own programming language, customized for online publishing, for it. There is no paywall, but Butterick asks readers to pay for the book by buying his fonts, making a voluntary payment, or buying the paperback Typography for Lawyers. And as an online book, it can link to references unobtrusively and even allow you to switch between Butterick’s fonts for the body text (a clever trick for selling those fonts).
But the best features of Practical Typography are the same things I love in Making Your Case and Tidying Up: It is short, pithy, supremely useful, easy to reference, and quick as lightning to access. It also has a take—it is written by someone who knows what they’re talking about and has an opinion about the right way of doing things. That’s what makes it not just practical but also interesting and fun.
What does this have to do with elder law?
Why am I going on about these books in a journal on elder law? Because we need books like these on the subject of elder law. We need books that are practical, focused, interesting, and forward-thinking. And by “we” I mean especially the new and nascent elder law attorneys our state so desperately needs.
Wisconsin elder law attorneys have a massive problem: demographics. Our state’s population is aging and will continue to do so for decades. But there aren’t enough elder law attorneys to serve even the current population adequately, and our efforts at recruitment have seen little success. There are about 800 members of this section, and membership has been declining somewhat in recent years. There are about 160 members of the Wisconsin chapter of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, the most committed elder law practitioners. The general shortage of lawyers practicing in the rural areas of the state is well known and only getting worse. What’s more, rural clients need a specialist elder law attorney more than anyone else, and yet the attorneys who do practice in rural areas often cannot take on the complexities of Medicaid planning while juggling their other five practice areas.
As a result, I, like many Wisconsin elder law attorneys, am often hired by clients who live two counties away and an hour’s drive from my office. I’ve helped some living in the far corners of the state. I’ve turned more away. These Wisconsinites need a specialist elder law attorney, and there either isn’t one anywhere closer, or the one that’s closer is too busy.
Where new elder law practitioners come from
Clearly, we need more elder law practitioners. Where will we find them? Elder law is not a popular subject in law schools. For some time, neither Wisconsin law school has offered a single course on elder law, though I hear that is changing. Regardless, courses taken in law school have a small influence on what a newly minted lawyer ends up practicing.
No, if we are to find more recruits for the practice of elder law, we will find them where we always have: in the ranks of solo and small firm lawyers already practicing throughout Wisconsin. Many of them have a general practice or do some estate planning—their clients need them to learn elder law. But these lawyers perhaps don’t know that they need to learn elder law, or don’t want to learn it, or can’t put in the time and effort required to learn it.
The effort required is the greatest barrier. I recently talked to another elder law attorney who described how he learned to practice elder law: he attended every single CLE seminar he could find on the subject, amassing scores of extra credit hours. For a solo who was not part of an established elder law firm, there was really no other way to do it. I think most of the first generation of elder law attorneys have a similar story: their clients needed them to figure it out, so that’s what they did. They did the research, made their own outlines, put together their own seminars, and drew their own conclusions. It was tough and it took time. It was yeoman’s work.
What we need now
Not everyone can be a yeoman, though. What we need now is not trailblazing but trail-tending. We must make the road wider, smoother, and easier, that more may take it. We have done a good job of that with seminars, workshops, and conferences (let’s acknowledge the incredible work put into these!). But those will only take us so far. They take a lot of time and are not a good way to store practical knowledge for later reference. That’s what we need books for—good books.
Of course, we already have one book: the State Bar’s Advising Older Clients. It’s a good start and a useful reference. But it does not tell new elder law attorneys how to actually practice elder law. It contains only one chapter on Medicaid, for example, while Medicaid planning may be half an elder law attorney’s workload. Its advice on strategies and how to execute them is bare. For a long time, experienced Wisconsin elder law attorneys have held this knowledge too close, fearing it will be used against them by those who view Medicaid planning as illegitimate.
If we want to win more lawyers to the practice of elder law, we will have to be freer with our hard-won knowledge. We must commit it to writing and make that writing widely available. We must create practical guides and handbooks that are pithy, fast, useful, and forward-thinking—something a new lawyer could pick up and use to help their first Medicaid client. A book to give them both competence and confidence.
I’m writing that book
So that is what I am going to do. I will be taking time this year to write Essential Medicaid Planning, a handbook for Wisconsin lawyers who need to understand long-term care Medicaid eligibility and help their clients plan for it. It will explain not just the law but how to apply it in practice—what to do and how to do it.
Essential Medicaid Planning will be published online at elderlawwis.com. It will cover nonfinancial eligibility, financial eligibility, divestment, estate recovery, planning strategies, applications, and maintaining eligibility. It will be focused, direct, fast, and practical. It will build on my experience publishing fair hearing decisions and incorporate them wherever possible. Because it is online, I will eventually be able to add features such as calculators (e.g., for checking cost share) and document assembly. It will be searchable and indexed.
It will also be full of on-demand CLE. I don’t know why seminars for lawyers and books for lawyers have always been separated, but I think they are better together. As I publish chapters, I will present one-hour webinars based on them and adding real-world commentary and context. These will be recorded and available afterward within the book, on demand.
I think our state needs Essential Medicaid Planning. I aim to make it easier than ever to start helping clients with elder law issues. Of course, it is only a start. There are many opportunities to create and pass on knowledge, if only we take the time now to do so. With better resources, we can make it easier to enter the field of elder law, increase the number of Wisconsin elder law attorneys, and prepare to meet the inevitable needs of our state.