By Lauren S. Marinaro, Esq.
From general contractor to elder law trailblazer, Molly M. Wood has stayed true to her Kansas Jayhawk roots.
Though her name rhymes with Hollywood, Molly Wood is a thoroughly midwestern girl. She moved to Wichita, Kansas, at the age of two and hasn’t left Flyover Country since. She graduated from the University of Kansas in Lawrence in 1976 with majors in English and history, and after a year of Medieval Studies in England, she applied and was accepted to KU Law School. Only trouble was, “I couldn’t think of a compelling reason to go to law school at that time. I mean, it seemed like something I could do, but that didn’t seem like a good enough reason.”
How Elder Law Found Molly
So, she returned to Wichita and got an entry-level job in the construction industry for a couple of different general contracting firms. Then she struck out on her own, opening up Wood Construction, Inc. in 1979. It was demanding, difficult work, and it taught Molly about owning and running a business and especially how to structure her time. She also built some great buildings, including a geodesic dome home for her parents in Wichita. But the 1980s were rough economically, and ultimately, Wood Construction, Inc. was not particularly profitable.
“I needed a job I could do sitting in a chair.” So, Molly went to law school — KU, again — graduating in 1991. Then it was back to the job hunt. “I didn’t consciously choose the field of elder law at that time. It was a relatively new thing. I just fell into it.”
Molly was hired to head up Jayhawk Legal Services for Senior Citizens, a new program at the Legal Aid Society of Topeka, an LSC office funded by the Older Americans Act and other senior-specific grants. She was back to being an employee rather than a business owner with new and interesting elder law matters and great colleagues to bounce ideas off of. Eventually she became the managing attorney of the Legal Aid Society of Topeka, but with less time to focus on individual client matters and more time spent on staff management and grant writing. She joined NAELA in 1996.
Working on Jayhawk Legal Services for Senior Citizens led to a new opportunity in 1996, when Professors Kim Dayton and David Gottlieb at KU Law asked Molly to head up their Elder Law Clinic. For the next 10 years, Molly was supervising clinical elder law placements in legal services, government and private firms, teaching the various subject areas of elder law, and discussing case studies with KU students.
Molly began considering her next step professionally. “I went to a NAELA conference in Vancouver when I was still at KLS, and I heard Lee Holmes, CELA, speak about properly valuing the work you do in elder law and the knowledgebase you have and it made me think, ok, I can market myself, I can set value for my work in a private firm setting.” She thought she’d hang out a shingle and discussed this with a friend who was a partner in the venerable Lawrence-based firm Stevens & Brand, LLP. She invited Molly to join the law firm instead. Molly has been a partner of Stevens & Brand since 2002, supporting a growing elder law practice group, including her distinguished partner and friend, Emily Donaldson, CELA.
When asked what she likes the best about her elder law practice, Molly replied, “When clients are at a complete loss, don’t know where to turn, and I can provide them with the solutions they need that really make them less anxious and more able to face these issues head on. I find that immensely satisfying.”
Personal Experience With the Challenges Faced By Her Parents
Molly had to weather some of those same feelings her clients have with her own parents. “My parents had been doing their own thing since I left home for college, and they had never actively involved me in their plans for themselves. They were smart about housing. They spent about 10 years as ‘winter Texans’ — they don’t call them ‘snowbirds’ in Texas — to stay out of the harsh Kansas weather and built an entirely handicapped-accessible home where they lived for the 15 years before the wheels came off. Then at age 84, my father broke his hip, and my mother brought him home from rehab. They were about three hours’ drive from me, but I might as well have been on the other side of the world for all the good I did. Their home-care plan was never robust, and my mother at 81 wasn’t the dynamic, decisive problem-solver she’d always been in the past; she couldn’t get ahead of the curve on her own. Long story short, after about a year of the strain, she was found in bed in a coma one morning and died two weeks later.
“Two weeks after that, I moved my father and his little dog (Dudley) into our home and took care of him until my father’s death three years later. I found myself in my mother’s position, but had learned to craft a home-care plan robust enough that I could continue to work, although it was confining. It was no fun watching my father’s life peter slowly out, but it was a labor of love and an education. I still have his little dog [pictured above].”
Molly also loves her involvement with NAELA and has been very involved with her Kansas Chapter; she was recognized as their Outstanding Chapter Member in 2010. She especially enjoys and is active on the NAELA Litigation Committee. “It’s fantastic to collaborate on these cases and think about these issues with the other committee members. It was great to work with Ron [Landsman, CAP] on my Hutson case.” (See “Awaiting Hutson’s Progeny,” on page 12.) She has also been a board member for Kansas Advocates for Better Care, an advocacy group assisting Kansans with long-term care problems since 1996.
Molly lives in Lawrence with Dudley. Besides work, her favorite things are running, cooking, watching anglophile shows like Netflix’s The Crown and KU Basketball. Rock Chalk!
Citation
1 Hutson v. Mosier, 401 P.3d 673, 2017 WL 3942586, Court of Appeals of Kansas, September 08, 2017.
About the Author
Lauren S. Marinaro, Esq., is an attorney at Fink Rosner Ershow-Levenberg LLC, Clark, New Jersey. Lauren is a member of the NAELA Public Policy Steering Committee, Litigation Committee, and Alliance Committee. She is president-elect of the NAELA New Jersey Chapter. Author’s Note: I am so pleased to be able to profile my KU Law clinical professor Molly M. Wood as featured member for NAELA News. Through her mentorship, Molly strongly influenced me and many other students of KU’s Elder Law Clinic, one of the first of its kind in the nation.