The Question She Couldn’t Stop Asking — and the Practice It Built

There’s a question that lives permanently in the back of Pooja Arora’s mind.

Who will take care of Ishaan when I’m no longer able to?

Ishaan is Pooja’s teenage son. He has severe autism, a complex medical history, cannot speak, and will need a full-time caregiver for his entire life. Raising him — navigating his intense medical needs, making the gut-wrenching decision to transfer him to a residential program in Southboro when the Lexington school system could no longer meet his needs, and learning to live with that grief — occupied most of Pooja’s adult life.

It also became the foundation of her law practice.

The Lexington Observer published Pooja’s story earlier this month(Link to the article). If you read it, you know the arc: the sleepless seasons caring for Ishaan, the return to law school, the years of specialization in estate planning and special needs law, and finally, in August 2024, the founding of My Special Legal Planning in Lexington.

What the article captured beautifully was why the practice exists. What it didn’t have space to cover is who it serves — and that’s what I want to add here.

This Is Not Only a Special Needs Story

Pooja’s personal journey brought her to estate planning through a very specific door. But what she does every day is much broader than any one door.

The families who walk into MSLP are young parents who want to make sure their kids are protected if something happens to them. They’re adult children who are realizing their aging parents have no plan in place. They’re immigrants who’ve discovered that U.S. estate law treats their situation differently than they expected. They’re couples who finally decide that talking about wills and trusts doesn’t have to mean talking about dying — it can mean talking about what they’re building.

Over 110 families in the Greater Boston area have worked with Pooja since she opened. Every one of them left a five-star Google review. When you read through them, the themes that come up aren’t about special needs planning specifically. They’re about clarity — how she takes something intimidating and makes it understandable. About patience — how she never rushes anyone through decisions that matter. About follow-through — how she’s still answering questions and chasing loose ends long after the paperwork is signed.

What She Does Differently — and Why

Pooja’s own experience as an estate planning client was not a good one.

She has described walking away from her first estate plan feeling “unsettled” — not fully understanding how the documents worked together, not clear on what the plan would actually look like when it mattered. She built her practice to be the opposite of that experience.

Her clients come in for wills, trusts, powers of attorney, healthcare proxies. They come in with aging parents, with newly blended families, with real estate that spans state lines, with retirement accounts they’ve never actually thought through. She also hosts free Saturday estate planning workshops for anyone in the community who wants to understand the basics before committing to a conversation.

The work is, in her words, about making sure families have a plan that will actually work — not just a stack of signed documents.

Why This Moment Matters

Estate planning is something most people know they should do and keep not doing. It sits on the list just below other things that feel urgent, and above the things they’ve fully accepted they’ll never do.

Pooja’s story — published in the Observer, shared by neighbors and community members — is a reminder that the question she carries about Ishaan is one version of a question every parent carries. Every family carries some version of it.

The answer to that question is a plan. And the plan, done well, is one of the most concrete ways to take care of the people you love.

📍 My Special Legal Planning — 424 Marrett Rd #202, Lexington, MA

📞 617–500–3229

🌐 myspeciallegalplanning.com

Licensed in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. LL.M. in Estate Planning.