DealBook: Debevoise & Plimpton Drops Trusts and Estates Practice

Last month, the nation’s leading trusts and estates lawyers convened at a Florida resort to discuss the latest in estate planning.

Between lectures and workshops, some of the lawyers exchanged whispers about an unsettling piece of gossip: Debevoise & Plimpton, the prominent white-shoe law firm, was eliminating its trusts and estates practice.

Debevoise’s decision surprised members of the trusts and estates bar. If an institution as prestigious and financially sound as Debevoise was abandoning its practice, were they vulnerable too?

The news also raised eyebrows across the legal industry because it seemed to run counter to Debevoise’s reputation for a strong partnership culture. At a time when many large law firms have discarded the traditional partnership model and embraced a more bottom-line approach, Debevoise has been seen as retaining an old-school ethos — a genteel law firm known for its camaraderie and decency.

“It saddens me to see a great law firm terminate its estates department,” said William D. Zabel, a partner at Schulte Roth & Zabel and one of the country’s leading trusts and estates lawyers. “Although I don’t know the reasons for this decision, it would seem to be a byproduct of the economics of our society, making the law into more of a business than a profession. That saddens me even more.”

In a statement, Michael W. Blair, Debevoise’s presiding partner, confirmed that it was jettisoning trusts and estates, and that the group’s eight lawyers — including Jonathan J. Rikoon, the partner in charge of the practice — were trying to find another home.

“Debevoise supports the group in this process and will work to ensure that in this transition the needs of the firm’s clients continue to be served,” he said.

New York-based Debevoise is the latest big corporate law firm to discontinue the practice. In 2011, Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a 1,200-lawyer firm, got out of trusts and estates, deciding it did not fit the firm’s business model. Another firm, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, with 1,100 lawyers, ended its trusts and estates practice about a decade ago.

Corporate law firms once viewed trusts and estates as a small yet important practice that discreetly advised wealthy families. But drafting wills and trusts, and the legal matters that flow from that, is less lucrative than the primary revenue drivers at big law firms: multibillion-dollar corporate transactions and high-stakes litigation.

And there are problems with trusts and estates within a big law firm model. The practice, to use the law firm management parlance, is not as leverageable as other areas. Corporate and litigation partners generate big fees by assigning armies of junior lawyers to megamergers and complex lawsuits. By comparison, trusts and estates work requires far less manpower, which mean far less profit.

Another issue in sustaining these departments is that individual clients bristle at billable rates that now reach more than $1,000 an hour. While big corporations grudgingly pay those rates, wealthy families often resist them.

As a result of these dynamics, firms’ trusts and estates practices have remained small and, in many cases, decreased. At the same time, firms have aggressively built up their corporate and litigation practices across the globe. They have also embraced hot, moneymaking practice areas like patent law and white-collar criminal defense.

There are some counterexamples to this trend, however. In 2011, seven trusts and estates lawyers from Weil, led by Carlyn S. McCaffrey, moved to McDermott Will & Emery, a firm with about 65 trusts and estates lawyers, one of the larger such practices. Another firm committed to trusts and estates is Katten, which has more than 50 lawyers in the group.

Joshua S. Rubenstein, the head of Katten’s trusts and estates practice, said that his business went well beyond comforting bereaved spouses and children. A successful practice, he said, includes assignments like advising families in the sale of closely held companies, overseeing trust-related litigation or even assisting in the purchase of a yacht or private jet.

“If done right, a full-service, high-end trusts and estates practice can generate a lot of work for other areas of the firm,” Mr. Rubenstein said.

As large firms have de-emphasized their trusts and estates practices, boutiques have sprouted up. Sanford J. Schlesinger, a former partner at the New York corporate firm Kaye Scholer, left in 2004 along with several colleagues to set up an 11-lawyer shop, Schlesinger Gannon & Lazetera.

Mr. Schlesinger lamented the demise of the practice at big firms, and said he thought they were missing a business opportunity.

“Families are going to pass more wealth in the next 10 years than in the history of humankind, and someone is going to have to shepherd that wealth transfer,” he said. “These firms are making a shortsighted, profit-driven decision without a view of the long-term big picture.”

Debevoise, started in 1931 by two young patrician lawyers, Eli Whitney Debevoise and William E. Stevenson, does not see it that way. Three decades ago, the firm’s trusts and estates practice had six partners, including Barbara Paul Robinson, now retired and a former president of the New York City Bar Association, and Theodore A. Kurz, the former head of the department. Today, there is only one, Mr. Rikoon, 57, who declined to comment for this article.

The firm formed a committee to study its trusts and estates practice, which has advised families like the Lauders (cosmetics) and the Dolans (cable television), according to people with direct knowledge of the group. After concluding that the practice did not have enough business to expand, the committee recommended closing it down. The firm will continue to employ Mr. Rikoon and the seven other lawyers while they interview elsewhere, these people said.

One factor contributing to Debevoise’s move to discontinue the group, people say, is its unusual lock-step compensation system, which pays partners in a narrow range strictly according to seniority. That means that Mr. Rikoon is paid on par with a star deal maker from the same law school year, while bringing in less business. This created some discord in the partnership ranks. Debevoise’s profits per partner are $2.1 million, according to The American Lawyer magazine.

Debevoise, with 650 lawyers, recently made headlines away from trusts and estates. The firm advised a special committee of Dell’s board on the $24 billion leveraged buyout of the computer company. And President Obama nominated the Debevoise partner Mary Jo White to run the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Stephen J. Friedman, a onetime Debevoise partner who is now president of Pace University, said that he was unaware of the facts involved in his former firm’s decision to close the trusts and estates practice, but noted that organizations are often faced with business realities that require painful choices.

“It’s sometimes necessary to make a decision that’s in the best interest of the firm but can hurt individual partners and associates,” he said. “That’s not a happy experience, but it’s sometimes the right thing to do.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/06/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Big Firms Back Away From Trusts And Estates.

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Ipswich Journal: Paul Mason Is One-Third the Man He Used to Be

Paul Nixon Photography

Paul Mason in 2012, two years after gastric bypass surgery stripped him of the unofficial title of “the world’s fattest man.”

IPSWICH, England — Who knows what the worst moment was for Paul Mason — there were so many awful milestones, as he grew fatter and fatter — but a good bet might be when he became too vast to leave his room. To get him to the hospital for a hernia operation, the local fire department had to knock down a wall and extricate him with a forklift.

That was nearly a decade ago, when Mr. Mason weighed about 980 pounds, and the spectacle made him the object of fascinated horror, a freak-show exhibit. The British news media, which likes a superlative, appointed him “the world’s fattest man.”

Now the narrative has shifted to one of redemption and second chances. Since a gastric bypass operation in 2010, Mr. Mason, 52 years old and 6-foot-4, has lost nearly two-thirds of his body weight, putting him at about 336 pounds — still obese, but within the realm of plausibility. He is talking about starting a jewelry business.

“My meals are a lot different now than they used to be,” Mr. Mason said during a recent interview in his one-story apartment in a cheerful public housing complex here. For one thing, he no longer eats around the clock. “Food is a necessity, but now I don’t let it control my life anymore,” he said.

But the road to a new life is uphill and paved with sharp objects. When he answered the door, Mr. Mason did not walk; he glided in an electric wheelchair.

And though Mr. Mason looks perfectly normal from the chest up, horrible vestiges of his past stick to him, literally, in the form of a huge mass of loose skin choking him like a straitjacket. Folds and folds of it encircle his torso and sit on his lap, like an unwanted package someone has set there; more folds encase his legs. All told, he reckons, the excess weighs more than 100 pounds.

As he waits to see if anyone will agree to perform the complex operation to remove the skin, Mr. Mason has plenty of time to ponder how he got to where he is. He was born in Ipswich and had a childhood marked by two things, he says: the verbal and physical abuse of his father, a military policeman turned security guard; and three years of sexual abuse, starting when he was 6, by a relative in her 20s who lived in the house and shared his bed. He told no one until decades later.

After he left school, Mr. Mason took a job as a postal worker and became engaged to a woman more than 20 years older than him. “I thought it would be for life, but she just turned around one day and said, ‘No, I don’t want to see you anymore — goodbye,’ ” he said.

His father died, and he returned home to care for his arthritic mother, who was in a wheelchair. “I still had all these things going around in my head from my childhood,” he said. “Food replaced the love I didn’t get from my parents.” When he left the Royal Mail in 1986, he said, he weighed 364 pounds.

Then things spun out of control. Mr. Mason tried to eat himself into oblivion. He spent every available penny of his and his mother’s social security checks on food. He stopped paying the mortgage. The bank repossessed their house, and the council found them a smaller place to live. All the while, he ate the way a locust eats — indiscriminately, voraciously, ingesting perhaps 20,000 calories a day. First he could no longer manage the stairs; then he could no longer get out of his room. He stayed in bed, on and off, for most of the last decade.

Social service workers did everything for him, including changing his incontinence pads. A network of local convenience stores and fast-food restaurants kept the food coming nonstop — burgers, french fries, fish and chips, even about $22 worth of chocolate bars a day.

“They didn’t deliver bags of crisps,” he said of potato chips. “They delivered cartons.”

His life became a cycle: eat, doze, eat, eat, eat. “You didn’t sleep a normal sleep,” he said. “You’d be awake most of the night eating and snacking. You totally forgot about everything else. You lose all your dignity, all your self-respect. It all goes, and all you focus on is getting your next fix.”

He added, “It was quite a lonely time, really.”

He got infections a lot and was transported to the hospital — first in a laundry van, then on the back of a truck and finally on the forklift. For 18 months after a hernia operation in 2003, he lived in the hospital and in an old people’s home — where he was not allowed to leave his room — while the local government found him a house that could accommodate all the special equipment he needed.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 6, 2013

The headline on an earlier version of this article misstated Paul Mason’s current weight relative to what he weighed nearly a decade ago. He is now about one-third, not two-thirds, the weight he was then.

Read More..

Ipswich Journal: Paul Mason Is One-Third the Man He Used to Be

Paul Nixon Photography

Paul Mason in 2012, two years after gastric bypass surgery stripped him of the unofficial title of “the world’s fattest man.”

IPSWICH, England — Who knows what the worst moment was for Paul Mason — there were so many awful milestones, as he grew fatter and fatter — but a good bet might be when he became too vast to leave his room. To get him to the hospital for a hernia operation, the local fire department had to knock down a wall and extricate him with a forklift.

That was nearly a decade ago, when Mr. Mason weighed about 980 pounds, and the spectacle made him the object of fascinated horror, a freak-show exhibit. The British news media, which likes a superlative, appointed him “the world’s fattest man.”

Now the narrative has shifted to one of redemption and second chances. Since a gastric bypass operation in 2010, Mr. Mason, 52 years old and 6-foot-4, has lost nearly two-thirds of his body weight, putting him at about 336 pounds — still obese, but within the realm of plausibility. He is talking about starting a jewelry business.

“My meals are a lot different now than they used to be,” Mr. Mason said during a recent interview in his one-story apartment in a cheerful public housing complex here. For one thing, he no longer eats around the clock. “Food is a necessity, but now I don’t let it control my life anymore,” he said.

But the road to a new life is uphill and paved with sharp objects. When he answered the door, Mr. Mason did not walk; he glided in an electric wheelchair.

And though Mr. Mason looks perfectly normal from the chest up, horrible vestiges of his past stick to him, literally, in the form of a huge mass of loose skin choking him like a straitjacket. Folds and folds of it encircle his torso and sit on his lap, like an unwanted package someone has set there; more folds encase his legs. All told, he reckons, the excess weighs more than 100 pounds.

As he waits to see if anyone will agree to perform the complex operation to remove the skin, Mr. Mason has plenty of time to ponder how he got to where he is. He was born in Ipswich and had a childhood marked by two things, he says: the verbal and physical abuse of his father, a military policeman turned security guard; and three years of sexual abuse, starting when he was 6, by a relative in her 20s who lived in the house and shared his bed. He told no one until decades later.

After he left school, Mr. Mason took a job as a postal worker and became engaged to a woman more than 20 years older than him. “I thought it would be for life, but she just turned around one day and said, ‘No, I don’t want to see you anymore — goodbye,’ ” he said.

His father died, and he returned home to care for his arthritic mother, who was in a wheelchair. “I still had all these things going around in my head from my childhood,” he said. “Food replaced the love I didn’t get from my parents.” When he left the Royal Mail in 1986, he said, he weighed 364 pounds.

Then things spun out of control. Mr. Mason tried to eat himself into oblivion. He spent every available penny of his and his mother’s social security checks on food. He stopped paying the mortgage. The bank repossessed their house, and the council found them a smaller place to live. All the while, he ate the way a locust eats — indiscriminately, voraciously, ingesting perhaps 20,000 calories a day. First he could no longer manage the stairs; then he could no longer get out of his room. He stayed in bed, on and off, for most of the last decade.

Social service workers did everything for him, including changing his incontinence pads. A network of local convenience stores and fast-food restaurants kept the food coming nonstop — burgers, french fries, fish and chips, even about $22 worth of chocolate bars a day.

“They didn’t deliver bags of crisps,” he said of potato chips. “They delivered cartons.”

His life became a cycle: eat, doze, eat, eat, eat. “You didn’t sleep a normal sleep,” he said. “You’d be awake most of the night eating and snacking. You totally forgot about everything else. You lose all your dignity, all your self-respect. It all goes, and all you focus on is getting your next fix.”

He added, “It was quite a lonely time, really.”

He got infections a lot and was transported to the hospital — first in a laundry van, then on the back of a truck and finally on the forklift. For 18 months after a hernia operation in 2003, he lived in the hospital and in an old people’s home — where he was not allowed to leave his room — while the local government found him a house that could accommodate all the special equipment he needed.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 6, 2013

The headline on an earlier version of this article misstated Paul Mason’s current weight relative to what he weighed nearly a decade ago. He is now about one-third, not two-thirds, the weight he was then.

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Q.& A.: Making Smartphones Easier to Read

Is there a way to make the text bigger in the iPhone mail app, and is there a screen magnification feature for apps that don’t zoom in?

The iPhone software does include controls for both making the screen text larger and magnifying the entire screen. To get to these controls in iOS 6, tap the Settings icon on the Home screen. On the Settings screen, tap General and on the next screen, tap Accessibility.

On the screen of Accessibility options, in the Vision area, tap Large Text and select a bigger point size from the samples shown. In this same settings area, you can also turn on the Zoom feature that allows you to magnify the entire screen by double-tapping three fingers on the glass. Apple’s site has more information on its other Accessibility settings.

Many Android smartphones also have accessibility settings for making the screen easier to see, but the steps for adjusting them depends on the phone model, carrier and version of Android. On a Samsung Galaxy SIII running Android 4.0 and later, you can fiddle with the font size by tapping the Menu button and then Settings. Scroll down and tap Display and then tap Font Size, where you can select a larger option.

Some versions of Android also include a screen-magnification feature and other options in the Accessibility area of the Settings menu. For older versions of Android, third-party software like the Big Font app can help make the screen text easier to see.

Accessibility options are built into most major smartphone platforms. Microsoft has information for Windows Phone 8 users here and BlackBerry owners can find out more here.

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Letter from Myanmar: Reclaiming Dialogue, by Literary Light

YANGON — As the midday sun wanes over Inya Lake here in Myanmar’s biggest city, double sculls start sweeping across the water in front of the usually sedate lawns of the Inya Lake Hotel.

Last weekend, the rowers must have wondered what all the noise was about. Puppet and magic shows were taking place against a backdrop of loud music, bookstalls and cafe tables dotting the grass. Every now and then, a burst of amplified laughter or cheers emerged from the hotel’s meeting rooms.

Inside, some of the world’s leading names in literature and politics were throwing around ideas, discussing their latest books and contemplating Myanmar’s transition toward democracy after nearly half a century of military rule. It was all part of the country’s first international literary festival.

“The very fact that this is happening — I’m still in a trance,” said the Burmese poet Ko Ko Thett, who had flown in from his studies in Vienna to take part.

The Irrawaddy Literary Festival emerged from a conversation the British ambassador’s wife, Jane Heyn, had with a friend in Yangon two years earlier. Within days, Mrs. Heyn had contacted the opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who had recently been released from house arrest and secured her agreement to serve as patron. Funding came from a local businessman, Serge Pun, and his Yoma Strategic Holdings, from Monument Books and others, including the British Council. Moderators were called in from Britain, India, Hong Kong and beyond, ranging from U Thaw Kaung, a venerable man of letters and former librarian at Rangoon University, to Rory Stewart, a writer and member of the British Parliament.

“The point about this is that it’s a nigh-miraculous event, given where we were five years ago, when I first came here. This was simply not conceivable,” said William Dalrymple, a prime mover of the Jaipur Literary Festival in India who recently published a history of the 1839-42 Afghan war, “Return of a King.”

He was joined in Yangon by Vikram Seth (who wrote “A Suitable Boy”), Akash Kapur (“India Becoming”) and Subha Shah (“The King in Exile,” about Burma’s last king, Thibaw). Also on hand were Jung Chang (“Wild Swans”) and Frank Dikötter (“Mao’s Great Famine”), the photojournalist Thierry Falise (“Burmese Shadows”), the travel writers Rory MacLean and Caroline Courtauld, the journalist Fergal Keane and the two of the best-known Burmese writers abroad, Thant Myint U (“The River of Lost Footsteps”) and Pascal Khoo Thwe (“From the Land of Green Ghosts”).

Burmese writers were well represented, fulfilling the organizers’ hopes that the festival would forge strong local links to carry the event into subsequent years.

Drawing the biggest crowds was Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi. She spoke of how books had been her companions in house arrest, and how she looked to them to connect her to the world.

“The books I like best are the books that make me think,” she said after describing her introduction to an avid reading life with the help of libraries at home and abroad. “Please read while you can. You never know when it will be useful.” She made an impassioned plea to support a plan for mobile libraries to bring vital reading matter all around the country.

Timothy Garton Ash, the British historian, writer and witness to the European transformations of 1989, delivered the festival’s Orwell Lecture. George Orwell’s work is well-known in Myanmar, not least for his colonial-era novel “Burmese Days.” Mr. Garton Ash said Orwell’s great lessons must now be applied in this exciting but precarious period of political change in Myanmar. These add up to a call for no violence, no euphemisms to disguise violence and, Mr. Garton Ash said, the courage to stand up not only to tyranny around us, but to new tyrannies in our minds.

Indeed, writing in Myanmar remains a political act, said the author and surgeon Ma Thida. U Pe Myint, editor of the People’s Age Journal, an independent news weekly, agreed. He warned that laws enacted under the former military-led government might still be used against journalists and writers, despite such developments as the recent dissolution of the press scrutiny board. Associates of the military are best positioned to forge new media empires and could put new freedoms at risk. Even the greater access now to the Internet, cheap DVDs and other distractions poses a threat to the reading culture that formed in part from decades of deprivation, he added.

Some of the books discussed at the festival underscored the high price many of the country’s writers have paid for the greater liberties they now enjoy. Ms. Ma Thida’s novel “The Roadmap,” published in 2011, deconstructs the military-led government’s seven-step “roadmap to democracy” in seven tart chapters about what this journey has meant for her and other dissidents and their loved ones. Beside her on the podium was the journalist Myo Myint Nyein, who recounted how his wife, weary of the struggle to earn a living and raise a family alone, sent him away when he finally returned after 12 years in prison. They have since reunited.

More than one writer noted that a striking element of the Irrawaddy festival was not just that it was taking place, but the diversity of views on display. After decades of suppression, the notion that different opinions could co-exist is profoundly radical.

Ms. Ma Thida said she wanted her country to join the world of debate, the open contest of ideas. Its authoritarian past, she said, had left it “stuck at the culture of the monologue,” where too many people push their positions without listening.

“Most people want to dictate to the people, or criticize the government,” she said. “I’m fed up with that kind of culture. I want interaction.”

At the festival, she and others made a start.

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DealBook: Liberty Global in Talks to Buy Virgin Media

6:59 a.m. | Updated

LONDON – Liberty Global, the international cable company owned by the American billionaire John C. Malone, is in discussions to buy the British cable company Virgin Media.

In a brief statement on Tuesday, Virgin Media said it was in talks with Liberty Global, which serves almost 20 million customers worldwide.

“Any such transaction would be subject to regulatory and other conditions,” Virgin Media said in a statement. Spokesmen for both Virgin Media and Liberty Global declined to comment further.

Shares in Virgin Media, which was formed through several mergers of small British cable companies and a cellphone company in the 2000s, rose more than 15 percent in morning trading in London on Tuesday.

The company’s current market capitalization stands at $10.4 billion. Including debt, Virgin Media’s enterprise value is around $19.4 billion, according to data from Thomson Reuters.

To secure a deal, analysts at Espirito Santo said Liberty Global may have to pay as much as $24 billion, though they questioned whether the international cable company could afford to fund the acquisition because of its existing high levels of debt.

The analysts added that it would be difficult for Liberty Global to make costs savings between its current European operations and those of Virgin Media.

“A bid from Liberty would not offer any in-market synergies but would add to the company’s scale on a European basis,” Espirito Santo analysts said in a note to investors on Tuesday.

Virgin Media’s share price has jumped almost 60 percent in the last 12 months, as more consumers sign up for so-called bundled services, including Internet and cellphone contracts.

The cable company, whose primary listing is on Nasdaq, is the second-largest pay-TV provider in Britain after BSkyB, which is partly owned by Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corporation.

The British billionaire Richard Branson, whose Virgin brand is now used for a variety of products and services, including airlines and banks, owns less than 3 percent of Virgin Media.

While the British cable operator has been picking up market share, the company currently has 4.9 million customers, or roughly half the number of subscribers as its larger rival, BskyB, according to filings from the companies.

A potential deal for Virgin Media would put Mr. Malone head-to-head with Mr. Murdoch, his longtime rival.

In 2008, the Liberty Group, which has operations in 13 countries, completed its purchase of a controlling stake in DirecTV, the satellite television provider, from News Corporation in a cash-and-equity deal worth roughly $11 billion.

The deal came after Mr. Malone’s purchase of a 16 percent stake in News Corporation, which he then traded for the satellite television operator, a number of regional sports networks and around $550 million cash.

Liberty Global has been expanding its presence in Europe and has operations from Ireland to Romania, though it failed last month in its bid to acquire the Belgian telecommunications company Telenet Group for $2.7 billion. Liberty Global currently owns a 58 percent stake in Telenet.

In August, Liberty Media, the media conglomerate also controlled by Mr. Malone, agreed to buy a stake in Barnes & Noble for $204 million, but declined to buy the bookseller outright.

The move disappointed some investors after Liberty had earlier offered to buy a 70 percent stake of Barnes & Noble for $17 a share if its chairman, Leonard S. Riggio, who owns around 30 percent of the company, agreed to the deal.

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The New Old Age Blog: In Blended Families, Responsibility Blurs

Every year, Fran McDowell waited for the summer week when she would sing in a choral festival in the North Carolina mountains, then spend a few days in a lakeside cabin with close women friends.

That getaway grew more complicated to arrange — but perhaps more necessary — after her husband, Herb Beadle, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. They had a “gloriously happy” marriage — her first, his second — for 11 years, and she was more than willing to care for him in sickness as in health. But he could no longer manage alone in their Atlanta home.

For a few years, other family members pitched in to allow Ms. McDowell her cherished vacation. Eventually, though, she had to ask her husband’s daughter, a medical professional in another state, to take him into her home for a week.

She said no, then yes. Then, the day before Ms. McDowell was to drive him there, her stepdaughter again refused, leaving no time for alternate arrangements. If this had been her biological child, “I would have said, ‘Come on, don’t do this to me,’” Ms. McDowell said. Instead, reluctant to make waves, she canceled her trip.

“I think confrontation is riskier for stepparents,” she told me. “I was the compliant one who would bite my tongue rather than say what I thought.”

Ms. McDowell never told her stepdaughter, or anyone in the family, how angry and disappointed she was, or how difficult it was becoming to care for their father, who died three years ago at 86. She told the members of her dementia caregivers support group instead.

It was that group’s leader, Moira Keller, who e-mailed me to suggest this topic. A clinical social worker with the Sixty Plus program at Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, she wrote that “one of the biggest challenges I have is blended families in later life.”

Though I’ve written about the way the 1970s’ spike in divorces could complicate caregiving for adult children — more households to sustain, more siblings to either help or hinder — I hadn’t considered the impact on the older people themselves.

But Ms. Keller seems to be onto something. “The generation most likely to have stepchildren” — the boomers — “don’t need much care yet,” said Merril Silverstein, a Syracuse University sociologist co-editing a coming issue of the Journal of Marriage and the Family on stepfamilies in later life. “The crunch will come in 10 or 20 years.”

Initially, many adult children whose divorced or widowed parents remarry seem delighted, Ms. Keller said when we spoke. “They’re thrilled that Mom or Dad isn’t alone,” she said. “It’s a wonderful thing — until somebody gets sick.”

Then, she has found, “it gets really blurry. Who’s going to do what?” Grown children don’t have much history with these new spouses; they often feel less responsibility to intervene or help out, and stepparents may be unwilling to ask. Perhaps it’s unclear whether children or new spouses have decision-making authority.

“Older couples in this situation fall through the cracks,” Ms. Keller said.

Research shows that the ties which lead adult children to become caregivers — depending on how much contact they have with parents, how nearby they live, how obligated they feel — are weaker in stepchildren, Dr. Silverstein said. Money sometimes enters the equation too, Ms. Keller added, if biological children resent a parent’s spending their presumed inheritance on care for an ailing stepparent.

Adela Betsill, another of Ms. Keller’s support group members, married her longtime partner five years ago — her second marriage, his third. She has since given up her interior design business to care for Robert who, at 72, has also developed Alzheimer’s disease. His two children have had little involvement — perhaps because she’s just 49 and presumed able to handle everything.

Thus, though Robert’s son works from an office in their home, if Ms. Betsill needed to go out and asked him to remind his father to eat lunch, “he might, or he might not,” she said. “I don’t think he realizes it’s a burden.” So she has not asked.

Would it be different if she were his biological mother and he saw her wearing out under the strain? She thinks so, but it’s hard to know. After all, biological families also experience plenty of conflict and avoidance as elders age.

Still, that sense of reciprocity we often hear from caregivers — she took care of me when I was young, so I need to help out now that she’s old — doesn’t apply in late-life stepfamilies. Ms. Betsill didn’t raise this man, or his half sister.

Older couples who marry or remarry often discuss their finances, Ms. Keller has found. (An elder attorney, Craig Reaves, discussed the legal consequences here.) But illness and dependence may prove even more difficult subjects to broach.

“If I could yell one thing from a mountaintop,” Ms. Keller said, “it’s to talk about this stuff, too. Who’s going to take care of you if you become sick? Talk about that while you’re still healthy.”

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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The New Old Age Blog: In Blended Families, Responsibility Blurs

Every year, Fran McDowell waited for the summer week when she would sing in a choral festival in the North Carolina mountains, then spend a few days in a lakeside cabin with close women friends.

That getaway grew more complicated to arrange — but perhaps more necessary — after her husband, Herb Beadle, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. They had a “gloriously happy” marriage — her first, his second — for 11 years, and she was more than willing to care for him in sickness as in health. But he could no longer manage alone in their Atlanta home.

For a few years, other family members pitched in to allow Ms. McDowell her cherished vacation. Eventually, though, she had to ask her husband’s daughter, a medical professional in another state, to take him into her home for a week.

She said no, then yes. Then, the day before Ms. McDowell was to drive him there, her stepdaughter again refused, leaving no time for alternate arrangements. If this had been her biological child, “I would have said, ‘Come on, don’t do this to me,’” Ms. McDowell said. Instead, reluctant to make waves, she canceled her trip.

“I think confrontation is riskier for stepparents,” she told me. “I was the compliant one who would bite my tongue rather than say what I thought.”

Ms. McDowell never told her stepdaughter, or anyone in the family, how angry and disappointed she was, or how difficult it was becoming to care for their father, who died three years ago at 86. She told the members of her dementia caregivers support group instead.

It was that group’s leader, Moira Keller, who e-mailed me to suggest this topic. A clinical social worker with the Sixty Plus program at Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, she wrote that “one of the biggest challenges I have is blended families in later life.”

Though I’ve written about the way the 1970s’ spike in divorces could complicate caregiving for adult children — more households to sustain, more siblings to either help or hinder — I hadn’t considered the impact on the older people themselves.

But Ms. Keller seems to be onto something. “The generation most likely to have stepchildren” — the boomers — “don’t need much care yet,” said Merril Silverstein, a Syracuse University sociologist co-editing a coming issue of the Journal of Marriage and the Family on stepfamilies in later life. “The crunch will come in 10 or 20 years.”

Initially, many adult children whose divorced or widowed parents remarry seem delighted, Ms. Keller said when we spoke. “They’re thrilled that Mom or Dad isn’t alone,” she said. “It’s a wonderful thing — until somebody gets sick.”

Then, she has found, “it gets really blurry. Who’s going to do what?” Grown children don’t have much history with these new spouses; they often feel less responsibility to intervene or help out, and stepparents may be unwilling to ask. Perhaps it’s unclear whether children or new spouses have decision-making authority.

“Older couples in this situation fall through the cracks,” Ms. Keller said.

Research shows that the ties which lead adult children to become caregivers — depending on how much contact they have with parents, how nearby they live, how obligated they feel — are weaker in stepchildren, Dr. Silverstein said. Money sometimes enters the equation too, Ms. Keller added, if biological children resent a parent’s spending their presumed inheritance on care for an ailing stepparent.

Adela Betsill, another of Ms. Keller’s support group members, married her longtime partner five years ago — her second marriage, his third. She has since given up her interior design business to care for Robert who, at 72, has also developed Alzheimer’s disease. His two children have had little involvement — perhaps because she’s just 49 and presumed able to handle everything.

Thus, though Robert’s son works from an office in their home, if Ms. Betsill needed to go out and asked him to remind his father to eat lunch, “he might, or he might not,” she said. “I don’t think he realizes it’s a burden.” So she has not asked.

Would it be different if she were his biological mother and he saw her wearing out under the strain? She thinks so, but it’s hard to know. After all, biological families also experience plenty of conflict and avoidance as elders age.

Still, that sense of reciprocity we often hear from caregivers — she took care of me when I was young, so I need to help out now that she’s old — doesn’t apply in late-life stepfamilies. Ms. Betsill didn’t raise this man, or his half sister.

Older couples who marry or remarry often discuss their finances, Ms. Keller has found. (An elder attorney, Craig Reaves, discussed the legal consequences here.) But illness and dependence may prove even more difficult subjects to broach.

“If I could yell one thing from a mountaintop,” Ms. Keller said, “it’s to talk about this stuff, too. Who’s going to take care of you if you become sick? Talk about that while you’re still healthy.”

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q.& A.: Fixing Incorrect Photo Dates

Why do my pictures have the wrong dates on them when I transfer them from the camera to the computer with the Picasa program?

One reason may be that the date and time settings on the camera were incorrect when the photos were taken. When you snap the shutter, a digital camera records more than just the image; it also embeds other data into the photo file.

This information includes the date, time, image dimensions and name of the camera manufacturer. If the camera’s own date setting is incorrect, it will write the wrong time in the photo file. (Google has more information about viewing a photo’s embedded data in Picasa on its site.)

To fix the problem for future photos you take, go into your camera’s settings menu and correct the date and time. For the photos you have already imported into Picasa 3.5 and later, select the pictures with the incorrect dates in a folder or album, go to the Tools menu and choose “Adjust Date and Time.” Enter the correct information in the New Photo Date area and click O.K.

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Ireland to Publish Report on Laundry Workhouses

DUBLIN - Ireland is preparing to quite literally wash its dirty laundry in public on Tuesday with the publication of an extensive report into the Magdalene Institutions, workhouses operated by Catholic religious orders where an estimated 30,000 girls and young women were detained between 1922 and 1996.

The dwindling group of survivors of the laundries are seeking a state apology for their treatment and payment for years of unpaid labor and pension payments. The “Maggies” were excluded from a previous compensation scheme for those who suffered in state-run institutions on the basis that the laundries were never inspected or regulated.

In an opinion piece in The Irish Times this morning, Jim Smith, an associate professor at Boston College and a committee member of the Justice for Magdalenes campaign group, said: “These women were abused in the past and have been abandoned in the present.”

“The women’s testimony is compelling,” he wrote. “It rebuts government claims that they entered these institutions ‘voluntarily’. It contradicts the religious orders’ assertion that women were free to come and go as they pleased.”

The 1,000-page report is expected to be presented to the Irish cabinet Tuesday afternoon. It was prepared by a committee formed from five government departments, chaired by Senator Martin McAleese, the husband of former Irish President Mary McAleese. It is expected to contain conclusions but no recommendations. It remains unclear if the government will take responsibility and issue a state apology.

The government set up the committee in June 2011 following a report from the United Nations Committee Against Torture, which described the system as slavery and called for the investigation.

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