Parker Law Firm

Focus and practice areas

The firm works across three connected fields of law: estate planning, elder law, and probate. It is based in White Plains, New York, and keeps a second office in New City. Most of its clients come from Westchester County and the Rockland area.

These three areas tend to feed into one another. Planning done during a client's life sets up the elder law strategies that follow, and both shape how an estate moves through probate later. Parker Law Firm handles all three, so a client can stay with the same office as circumstances change.

The people it works with are mostly organizing their own affairs or settling those of a relative. Homes, retirement savings, and long-term care are the recurring concerns, and those concerns run through all three of the firm's fields.

The estate planning documents

The firm's estate planning work covers the core documents families use to record their wishes. That set includes wills, revocable living trusts, irrevocable trusts, durable powers of attorney, and health care documents. Each tool does a distinct job. A will directs who receives property, a trust can hold and manage assets across time, and a power of attorney names someone to act on a person's behalf.

The two kinds of trusts on that list work in different ways. A revocable living trust can be changed or undone while the person who made it is alive, and it often helps property pass without going through probate. An irrevocable trust is fixed once it is set, and that firmness is what makes it useful for asset protection and Medicaid planning.

Durable powers of attorney and health care documents answer a different question: who acts when a client cannot. They name the person who handles money and medical decisions during illness or incapacity. The right combination of all these documents depends on what a family owns and how it wants things handled. As a reviewer, I read the range the firm names as a sign that it builds plans around each family's situation.

How the elder law practice works

Elder law at the firm centers on families and individuals as they age. A large part of that work is asset protection: arranging finances so a family keeps more of its savings against the cost of nursing home care. The firm pairs Medicaid planning with that goal, since Medicaid rules decide much of what a household can hold on to.

The clients for this kind of planning are often adult children helping a parent, or couples looking ahead to long-term care. Asset protection usually starts with a review of what a household owns: a home, retirement accounts, savings, and property that might count toward a Medicaid limit. From there the plan sorts what can be protected and how soon, since timing shapes what the rules will allow.

Medicaid planning runs on strict timelines. Eligibility often turns on a look-back period, where transfers of money or property in the years before an application come under review. General practice here involves mapping assets early, choosing which ones to shelter through trusts, and keeping records a caseworker can follow. In my opinion, that kind of forward planning suits older clients who want their affairs settled well ahead of a health crisis.

Who leads the work

David Parker runs Parker Law Firm and has practiced law for over 30 years, with his work focused on estate planning and elder law. He is a graduate of the George Washington University School of Law. Earlier in his career he was an assistant county attorney in Rockland County and an assistant attorney general for New York. Those public roles put him on the government side of legal matters before he moved to private practice.

His bar memberships line up with that focus. Parker belongs to the New York State Bar Association's Elder Law Section and its Trusts and Estates Section. He is also a former President of the Financial Planning Association of the Greater Hudson Valley, which links his legal work to the broader financial planning field. That background gives him a view of both the legal documents and the money questions behind them.

A long stretch in one region tends to build familiarity with the local courts. A lawyer who has worked in Westchester and Rockland for that long usually knows how the area's Surrogate's Courts and county offices run, and which steps move a file along. That kind of settled local knowledge is hard for a client to judge from a website, and Parker's record in the same region points to it.

What the probate work involves

Probate is the part of the firm's work that begins after a death. In New York, it runs through the Surrogate's Court, where a will is proved and an executor is granted authority to act. For many families it is their first real contact with a court, and the rules can feel unfamiliar. The firm handles the administration and settlement of estates, which is the practical side of that process.

General steps in an estate include filing the will with the court, notifying heirs, paying debts and taxes, and distributing what is left. Probate can take months, and the timeline stretches when an estate is large or when heirs disagree. An executor carries legal duties through all of it, valuing property and filing tax returns for the estate.

Careful estate planning can make these steps shorter for the people left behind. Because Parker Law Firm handles both the planning and the probate, the attorney who drafted a client's documents can also help carry them out. In my opinion, that steadying role is a real part of what a probate practice offers, past the filings themselves.

Offices, reach, and getting started

Two offices anchor the firm in the Hudson Valley, one in White Plains and one in New City. That spread covers both sides of the region the firm serves, across Westchester and Rockland. The two locations also cut the travel for clients on either side of the valley, which matters for older clients who may not drive far.

For people deciding whether to reach out, the firm offers a short initial phone consultation of about fifteen minutes. The educational side runs alongside it: the firm publishes a newsletter and a set of resources on estate planning, probate, and elder law. These materials use plain language for rules many people meet only once, which can help a client follow the choices in front of them.

That mix of a short first call and written explanation gives a prospective client an easy way to weigh the firm. It also keeps profiles on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and YouTube, where some of the same material appears.