Leger Law Group, LLC

Focus and practice areas

Leger Law Group, LLC is a Baton Rouge firm that represents individuals and families across Louisiana. The bulk of the work is estate planning, estate administration and real estate, with family law alongside it.

On the estate planning side, the firm handles wills, trusts and powers of attorney. It also reviews estate plans that are already in place, which matters when a family's circumstances change after the documents were signed.

The firm's family law services are prenuptial agreements, post-nuptial agreements, divorce and property settlements. That grouping is a sensible one in Louisiana, where the community property regime ties marriage, divorce and property division together in a way that most other states do not.

How the estate work is organised

Estate administration at the firm covers successions, small succession affidavits, trust administration and trust dissolution. Louisiana uses the word succession where most states say probate, and the firm's pages use both terms.

A small succession affidavit is a lighter procedure available when an estate falls under certain limits and the heirs agree. Louisiana law allows the heirs to sign a sworn document listing the property and the shares, and in the right circumstances that document can transfer title without a full court proceeding. General context, of course: whether any given estate qualifies depends on its size and makeup.

Trust administration and trust dissolution are the later stages of a plan the firm may have drafted years earlier. Administration means the trustee managing and distributing assets under the trust's terms. Dissolution means winding the trust up once its purpose is finished or its terms allow termination.

Elder law and long term care

The firm handles elder law, long term care planning, Medicaid qualification and special needs planning. These four fit together closely in practice.

Medicaid qualification for long term care turns on income and asset limits set by the state, and applications go through the Louisiana Department of Health. Applicants are generally asked for records covering a look-back period, which is why the timing of gifts and transfers becomes a planning question well before anyone applies. As a reviewer, I read the pairing of Medicaid work with estate planning as a sign the firm expects clients to arrive with both questions at once.

Special needs planning usually involves a trust designed so that a beneficiary with a disability can receive support while keeping eligibility for public benefits. The drafting has to be precise, because the wrong language can cost the beneficiary the very programs the trust was meant to supplement.

Real estate and transactional work

Siobhan Leger's real estate work is described in unusual detail on the firm's site. It covers lease contracts, lease-purchase agreements, property transfers, sales, donations, exchanges, title reviews and title clearing.

Donations and exchanges are worth pausing on. A donation of immovable property in Louisiana has to follow specific formal requirements, and families often use one to move property between generations during a lifetime. An exchange swaps one property for another, and it carries its own set of tax and title questions.

Title review and title clearing are the quieter half of the list. Reviewing a title means tracing the chain of ownership and finding anything that clouds it: an unreleased mortgage, an heir who never signed, a boundary described two different ways. Clearing it means fixing those problems, sometimes with a corrective act and sometimes with a court proceeding. In my opinion, a firm that does both successions and title clearing is well placed to catch the common Louisiana problem of property still sitting in a deceased relative's name.

Who does the work

Siobhan Leger

Siobhan Leger is the managing attorney. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Louisiana State University, then a Juris Doctor and a Graduate Diploma in Comparative Law from LSU's Paul M. Hebert Law Center.

The Graduate Diploma in Comparative Law deserves a note for readers outside the state. Louisiana's private law descends from the civil law tradition, so its rules on property, successions and obligations work differently from the common law used everywhere else in the country. The comparative law diploma at LSU covers that common law side, and graduates come out with training in both systems.

Before opening Leger Law Group, she practiced estate planning, estate administration, probate and real estate law at a Baton Rouge area firm. Her current focus is wills and trusts, estates, real estate, attendance planning and family law. The practice areas she lists now line up closely with the ones she handled before, which suggests continuity in the type of matter she takes on.

What clients can expect from the matter types

Most of the firm's work is document-driven and moves through predictable stages. A succession in Louisiana typically begins with an affidavit of death and heirship, then moves to a petition filed in the district court of the parish where the deceased lived or owned property. A judgment of possession puts the heirs formally in ownership.

Prenuptial agreements in Louisiana have their own timing rule. A matrimonial agreement signed before the marriage must be executed by authentic act or by act under private signature duly acknowledged. Couples who want to opt out of the community property regime after the wedding face a further step, since a court approval requirement applies once the marriage has begun.

Divorce filings in the state follow one of two main tracks under the Civil Code, distinguished by the length of separate living required and by whether fault is alleged. Property settlement then divides the community, and that partition can be handled by agreement between the spouses or by the court.

Estate plan reviews sit outside this pattern. They are short engagements, usually prompted by a marriage, a birth, a death, a move to a new state or a change in the tax rules. The firm lists them as a separate service rather than folding them into new plan drafting.

Reading the listing

The firm's public information is concentrated on its own site, and the areas it names are described with enough granularity to tell a reader what a matter would actually involve. The site does not state a founding year, and it lists no social media profiles.

What the site does give is a clear map of one attorney's docket. Estate planning and successions form the spine, real estate transactions run alongside them, and family law covers the agreements and divorces that touch community property. Leger Law Group, LLC operates from an office on Bluebonnet Boulevard in Baton Rouge and takes clients throughout Louisiana.