Oliver Bivins was allegedly living in a dirty and uncared for condo in Palm Beach, Florida, when his son Julian wanted to relocate him back to  Amarillo, Texas, where the Bivins family had made their fortune in oil and gas.

“I thought it would be a no-brainer to transfer Oliver home,” said attorney J. Ronald Denman, litigator with the Bleakley Bavol Law, whom the younger Bivins had hired in 2011.

Instead, the case dragged on for six years. Denman had unwittingly signed on to an elder guardianship case in which a diagnosis of incapacitation had turned Oliver Bivins into a ward of the state of Florida along…