Kornfeld Law Firm

Focus and practice areas

This Brooklyn, New York firm works across two connected fields of law. One is estate planning together with elder law. The other is real estate. On the estate planning side, the firm handles asset protection, probate and estate administration, and charitable planning. On the elder law side, it takes on Medicaid applications, special needs planning, and veterans benefits.

Those areas carry a lot of procedure, which shapes the day-to-day work. Medicaid applications in New York run through a county process with financial lookback rules, so much of the effort goes into gathering records and getting the timing right. Veterans benefits claims move through separate federal channels with their own eligibility tests. Special needs planning usually centers on a trust that holds assets for a person with a disability while keeping public benefits in place. Elder law work often turns on protecting a home or savings while a client qualifies for care coverage. Probate and estate administration cover the court steps that follow a death: validating a will, settling what the estate owes, and distributing what remains.

As a reviewer, I read the firm's mix of practice areas as one built around older clients and families who want to plan ahead. Asset protection and charitable planning point in the same direction, since both tend to matter most when someone is organizing an estate with a long view in mind.

How the team is built

The site names three attorneys and splits the practice along clear lines. Jason Kornfeld is a co-founding partner who works in estate planning and elder law. Sam Stein works in those same two areas. Joseph Kornfeld, listed on the site as H. Joseph, handles the real estate matters. Two attorneys carry the estate and elder law files, and one attorney runs the real estate side.

Support staff back the attorneys on client services, trust funding, and deed recording. Trust funding is the step where the firm retitles assets into a trust after the client signs the documents, and it is easy to leave half-finished. Deed recording puts a property transfer onto the public record so ownership is clear later. Assigning staff to both tasks suggests the firm carries a plan through the administrative work that follows the signing.

How the firm structures its meetings

Kornfeld Law Firm runs its estate planning through a set sequence of meetings: a vision meeting, a design meeting, a signing meeting, and a review meeting. Jason Kornfeld conducts the first of these. In the vision meeting, he listens to a new client's situation and gives initial recommendations before the firm drafts any documents. The design meeting turns those recommendations into a plan, the signing meeting puts it into effect, and the review meeting checks it later.

The design and review stages matter because circumstances change. A plan written years ago can fall out of step with new tax rules, a new marriage, a new child, or a new property. A scheduled review meeting gives a client a fixed point to catch that drift and update the documents. In my opinion, that recurring review step is the part of the process most likely to help clients over the long run, since estate plans fail most often when nobody revisits them.

Workshops and client outreach

Jason Kornfeld leads the firm's outreach and gives estate planning workshops in Brooklyn and the greater New York area. Workshops let people learn the basics of wills, trusts, and elder law before they sit down for a one-on-one meeting. For a subject that many people put off, a low-pressure group setting gives them a way to start. It also lets the firm explain its meeting process in advance, so someone who later books a vision meeting already knows how the stages run. Outreach of this kind tends to bring in clients who have thought about their goals before they arrive, which can make the first meeting more productive.

The real estate division

Joseph Kornfeld handles the firm's real estate matters through a separate division with its own office. The work includes property deed transfers, co-op transfers, and out-of-state deed recording. Co-op transfers in New York carry their own paperwork, since a co-op sale moves shares in a housing corporation, and a board often reviews the buyer before the deal closes. Out-of-state recording matters when a client owns property beyond New York, since each state keeps its own land records.

Much of this real estate work connects back to the estate planning side. When a client sets up a trust, real property often needs to move into it by deed, and property in another state means recording that deed in the jurisdiction where it sits. Keeping a real estate attorney in the same firm lets the office handle those transfers as part of funding a trust. That link between the two divisions is the clearest sign of how the firm fits its services together.

Experience the site describes

The firm's website states that its attorneys have over 37 years of experience. The site does not list a founding year. What the pages set out is a firm organized into two Brooklyn divisions, with estate planning and elder law on one side and real estate on the other, backed by support staff assigned to trust funding, deed recording, and client services.