Kitroser Lewis & Mighdoll

Florida did not formally recognize elder law as a specialty until 1986. Kitroser Lewis & Mighdoll had opened its North Palm Beach office a year earlier, in 1985, which means the firm was practicing in a corner of law the state had not yet bothered to name. A second office in Stuart came later, extending Kitroser Lewis & Mighdoll across Palm Beach and Martin counties. Forty years inside one narrow band of work, estate planning, probate, elder law, and trust litigation, can go two ways: it builds a firm with genuine depth, or it produces one that simply never had a reason to grow. The public record on this one comes down on the side of depth, and it does so without much room for argument.

Estate planning, probate, elder law services

The service list at Kitroser Lewis & Mighdoll runs through the instruments anyone in this trade expects to see: wills, revocable and irrevocable trusts, powers of attorney, healthcare directives, asset protection, business succession, domicile planning for the steady traffic of Florida transplants, irrevocable life insurance trusts, and special needs trusts. Pet trusts make the list as well. That is a real statutory vehicle, and a firm names it only after it has handled enough strange family arrangements to stop pretending one template covers every household. Florida's retiree population keeps demand for precisely this menu high, decade after decade, so the breadth here reads as a response to who walks through the door, not keyword padding for a directory entry.

Wills, trusts, powers of attorney

What separates Kitroser Lewis & Mighdoll from the planning-only shops is that it litigates. The firm takes will contests, trust disputes, financial exploitation claims, and wrongful death matters. There is a structural payoff in drafting documents and then fighting over them in court. A vague clause that turns into a two-year sibling war teaches the drafter exactly where language fails under pressure, and most estate attorneys never set foot in a courtroom, so they never find out where their own paragraphs split open once someone has a financial reason to pry. That feedback loop quietly improves every trust Kitroser Lewis & Mighdoll writes afterward.

Litigation over wills, trusts, financial exploitation

Elder law fills out the rest: Medicaid planning, long-term care, elder abuse protection, and guardianship or conservatorship work for minors and incapacitated adults. Florida's Medicaid income and asset rules are pitiless, and a practitioner who only half-knows them can cost a client far more than the fee they imagined they were saving by going cheaper.

Medicaid planning, guardianship, long-term care

The firm puts its combined attorney experience above 100 years. Senior managing attorney Mitchell I. Kitroser holds a Martindale-Hubbell AV Preeminent peer rating, the platform's top mark for legal ability and ethics, awarded by other lawyers and neither bought nor self-applied. Kitroser Lewis & Mighdoll also appears on Super Lawyers for estate and trust litigation in Palm Beach County. Neither of those is a pay-to-display directory sticker; both run on peer evaluation, which is the one form of credential in this field that means anything. Together they put the century-of-experience figure on a footing other than the firm's own word, and in a profession where everyone claims experience, that distinction does most of the heavy lifting.

Credentials from peer evaluation networks

Avvo carries a 5.0 rating across dozens of reviews, a score difficult to hold over that many evaluations unless the work lands consistently. FindLaw lists multiple verified client reviews for the North Palm Beach office and a separate entry for Stuart, with professionalism, expertise, and compassion recurring. Yelp has two listings, one per office, each with a handful of reviews and a couple dozen client photos attached to the North Palm Beach entry. No Trustpilot or BBB presence, which is ordinary for an estate and probate practice; legal clients cluster on Avvo and FindLaw, and the coverage there is consistent across both offices.

Client reviews across Avvo, FindLaw, Yelp

One detail rewards a closer look. The word compassion turns up independently on platforms with no visible link to one another. For probate and elder law that is not the throwaway compliment it would be in some other trade. People write these reviews while burying a parent or untangling a relative's incapacity, and the same word surfacing across unconnected sources tells you something specific about how the firm treats people who are having the worst year of their lives.

Compassion noted repeatedly in independent reviews

The Kitroser Lewis & Mighdoll website carries attorney profiles, a client testimonials section, a blog, downloadable forms, and a free consultation request form. The downloadable forms are a practical touch: a client who arrives at the first meeting having already worked through the paperwork moves faster and bills fewer hours. The main phone line and full street addresses sit prominently beside the consultation form. With two offices covering opposite ends of the region, it pays to confirm which one you want before you start the drive, though that is a question for a map, not a mark against the firm.

The practice areas at Kitroser Lewis & Mighdoll are substantive, the peer ratings rest on actual peers, and the client feedback stays steady across platforms the firm cannot edit. The AV Preeminent rating supports the experience claim. The FindLaw and Avvo reviews support the compassion claim. The litigation work supports the drafting-quality claim. For once the firm's account of itself and the outside record say the same thing, and the published credentials are enough to size up the place without ever picking up the phone. As estate-firm profiles go, this is about as clean as they come.

The page is silent on one subject: money. Nothing in the public record touches hourly rates, retainer expectations, or how a matter gets priced once it slides from routine planning into a contested trust fight. Estate attorneys at this credential level almost never post fee schedules, and the spread between drafting a trust and litigating one is enormous in both hours and dollars. That figure exists nowhere on the listing, and a prospective client will only learn it by asking.