What is a conservatorship? What to know after Jay Leno files for one over wife’s estate

Jay Leno is the latest celebrity to put a spotlight on the legal arrangement known as a conservatorship, after the former "Tonight Show" host filed a petition for a conservatorship over his wife's estate.

Leno, 73, filed for the conservatorship on Jan. 26 in Los Angeles, saying Mavis Leno, his wife of 43 years, is unable to manage her financial resources. Her doctor stated that she "suffers from dementia," according to court documents.

Leno has not spoken publicly about his wife's health issues, but the petition stated that Mavis has been "progressively losing capacity and orientation to space and time for several years.”

The petition form also stated that Mavis Leno, 77, is "able but unwilling" to attend a court hearing on April 9 regarding the conservatorship, but "does not wish to contest the establishment" of the legal arrangement. She also does not object to Jay serving as the conservator, according to court documents.

Leno stated in his petition that he "wishes to create a trust to hold each of his and Mavis’s one-half interest in their community property.”

The television host also requested to create a revocable trust and will to provide for Mavis and her brother, who is her sole living heir aside from her husband, court documents said.

Leno's petition for conservatorship is the latest high-profile petition by a celebrity seeking the arrangement.

In early January, Cher's petition for a conservatorship over her son's finances was denied by a Los Angeles judge. The music legend petitioned the court saying the struggles with addiction by her son, Elijah Blue Allman, 47, have left him unable to manage his money.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Jessica A. Uzcategui ruled that Cher’s attorneys had not given Allman and his legal team the necessary documents to give them sufficient time to make their case and temporarily denied the conservatorship request.

In August 2023, former NFL offensive lineman Michael Oher, whose life inspired the 2009 hit movie "The Blind Side," filed to remove a conservatorship involving the Tuohy family.

He alleged that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who he says told him they were adopting him at age 18, deceived him about his legal family status and exploited him for financial gain.

In response, the Tuohys denied Oher's allegations and accused him of attempting a "shakedown," claiming they had given him "an equal cut of every penny received from ‘The Blind Side.'"

Pop star Britney Spears was also under a conservatorship overseen by her father for 13 years before the #FreeBritney movement in 2021 created intense media scrutiny of the arrangement.

The conservatorship was dissolved in November 2021 by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge after Spears gave emotional testimony in court about the arrangement.

Read on for a breakdown of what exactly a conservatorship is and what legal experts think of the cases involving Oher and Spears.

What is a conservatorship?

A conservatorship is a legal arrangement in which one or multiple guardians are appointed to make important decisions — often financial or health-related — for someone who is considered unable to make those decisions for themselves.

Conservatorships are designed for people "suffering from a mental, psychological, [or] emotional disability that prevents them from making those types of decisions and will suffer harm because of their inability to make those decisions," according to New York-based conservatorship and estate planning attorney Jeffrey Asher.

"In its most healthy form, those are the people that we're trying to protect," Asher tells TODAY.com. "And somebody who loves and cares for them will make decisions for them."

Sean Tuohy told the Daily Memphian that he and his wife were legally advised to pursue the conservatorship when Oher was 18.

“We contacted lawyers who had told us that we couldn’t adopt over the age of 18; the only thing we could do was to have a conservatorship,” he said. “We were so concerned it was on the up-and-up that we made sure the biological mother came to court.”

New York-based trusts and estates attorney Ashwani Prabhakar adds that although specific laws surrounding conservatorships differ from state to state, the allegation that a person does not have the capacity to make their own decisions is one that needs to be proved in court.

"It should be a high bar to me," Prabhakar tells TODAY.com. "This person should have their human rights for self-determination taken away and given to the person who's petitioning because this incapacitated person can't handle it on their own."

How can conservatorships be abused?

The "least restrictive" way of enabling the Tuohys to support Michael's decision-making would have been through power of attorney, Asher says. Power of attorney, as defined by the American Bar Association, allows someone to "the power to act on your behalf as your agent."

"They could have applied to college, gotten a driver's license, open up a bank account, managed his income," Asher says. "They could have done basically everything with a power of attorney."

A key difference between power of attorney and a conservatorship is that Oher would have been able to sign his own contracts, independent of the Tuohys.

Under a conservatorship, however, Oher would not be able to make his own basic decisions.

"Any decision that he makes on his own — driver's license, checking account, credit cards, loans, financing, deal contracts, whatever — would have been null and void because by getting a conservatorship, the court is basically saying he doesn't have the capacity to make those decisions on his own," Asher says.

Asher adds that conservatorship abuse often happens when the person allegedly in need of a conservator does not have a clear idea of what kind of agreement they are entering. Oher has alleged in his 2011 memoir that the Tuohys told him a conservatorship "means pretty much the exact same thing as 'adoptive parents'" when they asked him to sign at age 18.

"What I find in my experience is that many times there are explanations given that might seem helpful to convince the person but are not exactly correct," Asher says.

Oher's case comes less than two years after Britney Spears's prominent and controversial conservatorship ended in November 2021. Spears, a pop star, was placed under the conservatorship of her father when she was 26, an arrangement that became the center of the #FreeBritney movement in 2020.

"In both cases, you had independent court investigators who looked at the situation, then you had a judge who looked at it, and so it was like a double failure," Prabhakar says. "And I would be dying to read the court investigator's report on Michael Oher because he had shown no sign of doing anything crazy or any mental incapacity. So I'm not sure what basis was given."

How can conservatorship abuse be prevented?

Regardless of whether public opinion falls in support of Oher or the Tuohys, Prabhakar and Asher say there is room for improvement in how the American judicial system handles conservatorships.

To Prabhakar, judges and court investigators need to scrutinize cases more closely when deciding whether an individual is incapacitated to the point of needing a conservator.

"When a judge's sentencing someone to prison, they're taking away their human rights," Prabhakar says. "You're going to be confined and you're going to eat at this time and you're going to do this and that when people tell you to, so those sentencing decisions on whether someone's guilty are taken very heavily in our society. And I think there's a failure in both the legal community and among judges, that somehow conservatorships are not as serious when they involve the same human rights."

Most of all, however, Prabhakar and Asher both say that conservatorship abuse may be stymied if individuals have access to legal advice when considering whether to consent to a conservatorship.

Some states, like New York, appoint an attorney for every individual who is allegedly in need of a conservatorship. In Tennessee, however, where Oher grew up and signed his conservatorship with the Tuohys, the law only requires the court to appoint an attorney at the request of the person allegedly in need of an appointee.

"I definitely think that all states should appoint an attorney who could say, 'Hey, Michael, I am only working for you. What do you want?'" Prabhakar says. "And then advocate and say to him, 'Look, Michael, you're going to be making a lot of money, and these folks are gonna have a cut of it or they're gonna tell you how to spend it or they're gonna put it in an account that only they can control. Do you really want that?'"

Asher also says people should have attorneys representing them to help them understand the larger picture before they enter a conservatorship.

"We need to communicate better, we need to educate better, and maybe we need to revisit a conservatorship over time to see if they'll need it or if it needs to be modified," Asher says.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com