The Marrone Law Firm, P.C.

Focus and practice areas

Four related fields make up the whole of this Syracuse practice: elder law with Medicaid planning, estate planning, probate and trust administration, and guardianship with special needs planning. All four touch the same set of clients, usually older adults and the families who help them.

The elder law side covers Medicaid pre-planning as well as crisis planning, which is the work families need when a nursing home admission has already happened. Anthony A. Marrone II and the firm also handle Medicaid applications themselves, along with fair hearings and appeals when an application gets denied.

Estate planning at the firm runs to wills, trusts, health care proxies and powers of attorney. It also covers post-mortem planning for executors, trustees and other estate fiduciaries, meaning the decisions that come up after a death rather than before one.

Litigation within the same subject matter

The firm handles will contests and trust contests. That places it on both sides of the same documents: drafting them for clients who are planning, and arguing about them in court when a family disputes what a document says or how it came to be signed.

In my opinion that combination is worth noticing when choosing counsel. A lawyer who regularly litigates estate documents tends to draft with an eye on how the drafting will look later, under challenge.

Guardianship work and what it involves

The firm represents guardians in Article 17-A and Article 81 proceedings, and it also accepts appointment as guardian and as trustee. Those are two different roles. In one, the firm advises a family member; in the other, a court appoints the firm itself to hold responsibility.

Some general context helps here. Article 17-A guardianship in New York applies to adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities, and it is typically a plenary appointment made in Surrogate's Court. Article 81 works differently: a Supreme Court judge tailors the powers to the specific abilities the person has lost, after a hearing and a report from a court evaluator.

Both routes involve petitions, notice to interested parties, and an ongoing reporting duty once someone is appointed. Annual accountings go to the court, and a court examiner reviews them.

Special needs planning

The firm prepares trusts for people with special needs. Trusts of this kind exist so that money set aside for a disabled beneficiary does not disqualify that person from means-tested benefits such as Medicaid and SSI. The drafting rules are technical, and the trust language has to satisfy both federal benefit regulations and New York trust law.

Who runs the firm

Anthony A. Marrone II founded the firm and holds the title of Chief Executive Officer. His own practice covers the same ground the firm does: New York elder law, Medicaid, trusts and estates, guardianships, and special needs planning.

Marrone grew up in Syracuse. He took his B.A. at Le Moyne College in 2006 and his J.D. at Syracuse University College of Law in 2009, graduating cum laude. He is admitted in New York and before the Federal Court for the Northern District of New York.

He previously held an appointment as Court Examiner for Article 81 guardianships in Cayuga, Cortland and Tioga counties. Court examiners are the people who audit guardian accountings for the court. As a reviewer I read that as relevant background for a practice that now files those accountings and defends them.

Where the firm works

The main office is in Syracuse. A second office in Watertown operates by appointment, which puts the firm within reach of Jefferson County and the northern part of the state.

The firm was founded in 2015 with Central and Northern New York as its stated service area. That geography matters more in this field than in some others. Medicaid applications in New York get processed by county departments of social services, and local practice varies from county to county in what documentation gets requested and how quickly a decision comes back.

Guardianship venue follows the same county logic. An Article 81 petition is filed where the allegedly incapacitated person resides, so a firm covering both Onondaga County and the North Country appears before several different benches.

What the record shows

The firm has operated since 2015 under a single named attorney whose listed credentials, court admissions and prior court appointment all sit inside the same subject area the firm sells. There is a consistency there that a directory built on evidence can verify from public sources.

The website describes the services in concrete terms. It names the statutes for guardianship, the specific documents in the estate practice, and the stages of a Medicaid case including the appeal route. That level of specificity gives a prospective client something to check against their own situation before they call.

Prospective clients will find that a Medicaid crisis matter and an estate contest move on very different clocks. Crisis Medicaid planning is measured in weeks, since the applicant may already be in a facility accruing private-pay charges. A contested probate proceeding in Surrogate's Court can run for a year or more once discovery of the drafting attorney's file begins.

Practical scope for a family

A family dealing with a parent's decline often needs several of these services at once: a power of attorney signed while capacity remains, a Medicaid plan, and possibly an Article 81 petition if the power of attorney was never executed. The firm covers all three points on that timeline.

When capacity is already gone, the planning options narrow sharply. A power of attorney cannot be signed by someone who no longer understands it, and guardianship becomes the remaining path. Firms that handle both the planning and the guardianship can move between them without a referral.

Fair hearings deserve a separate mention. When a county denies a Medicaid application, the applicant has a right to an administrative hearing before a state hearing officer, and the deadline to request one is short. The firm lists this work explicitly, which suggests it takes denials past the county level rather than restarting the application.

Reading the listing

The Marrone Law Firm, P.C. presents a narrow practice with visible depth in it. Elder law, Medicaid, estates, guardianship and special needs planning form a connected body of work, and the firm's founder trained and was appointed within that same body of work.

For a Syracuse-area family weighing Medicaid eligibility, an estate dispute, or a guardianship petition, the fit is direct. The firm has been operating in these areas since 2015 from Syracuse, with Watertown appointments available.