Mich. Comp. Laws §700.5506 et seq. · Michigan
Michigan: how to sign your advance directive
Michigan has one instrument and it is not the one people ask for. The patient advocate designation appoints someone to make your decisions. A living will is not recognized as a legally binding Advance Directive in Michigan — the state says so in those terms.
Why WearableDocs
In Michigan, a signed directive in a drawer is not enough
The statute makes delivery — or getting the document into the medical record — part of what switches the directive on. A relative who might know which drawer is not a plan. WearableDocs stores the document you signed and puts it on a page that opens when someone scans your card, so the person who needs it can build the record while there is still time.
You answer a few questions — your name, your state, and what you refuse — and WearableDocs builds the directive. Print it, sign it, upload it. Changing your answers later is part of the plan, so nothing is locked in.
What Michigan asks
What you need to sign in Michigan
- Instruments
- Patient advocate designation only. A living will is "not recognized as a legally binding Advance Directive" but may be combined with a designation to guide the advocate
- Form
- No statutory form
- Execution
- Two witnesses, no notary
- May not witness
- Your spouse, parent, child, grandchild, sibling, presumptive heir or known devisee, physician, or your patient advocate; employees of your insurer, of a facility, or of a home for the aged
- May not be your agent
- None — no substantive disqualification, only the requirement that the advocate be 18 or older
- Copy rule
- Delivery as a precondition, twice over — see below
- Delivery
- Yes — and this is the strongest in the country. A copy must go to the advocate, the advocate must sign an acceptance, and the designation must be in the medical record before it is implemented
- Registry
- None
- Age
- No departure from 18 recorded for the principal; the advocate must be 18 or older
- Carried device
- Nothing for the designation
- Citation
- Mich. Comp. Laws §700.5506 et seq.
Read from the enacted statute, 2026-09-18.
The instrument
What Michigan actually recognizes
That does not make instructions useless. They may be combined with a valid designation, where they guide the advocate. They simply do not bind anyone on their own.
Michigan also rebuilt this area recently. 2023 Act 187, effective 1 July 2024, repealed §§700.5501–5505 and moved the general durable power of attorney to the Uniform Power of Attorney Act. The patient advocate designation stayed where it was, in EPIC Part 5.
And Michigan does something almost no state does: a valid designation still does not operate until two further things happen.
What the popular guides get wrong
Corrections for Michigan
"Witnessed or notarized." Michigan uses witnesses only. The "or notarized" language that appears in circulating material is grandfathering for documents executed before 2000. A Michigan designation witnessed by two people and not notarised is fine; one notarised and not witnessed may not be.
"A living will is a valid advance directive in Michigan." It is not recognized as a legally binding instrument. It can inform your advocate. It does not bind a provider, and a Michigander relying on one alone is relying on nothing enforceable.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Michigan
WearableDocs is how your Michigan advance directive gets found. There is no device provision and no copy-equivalence rule — which is striking, given how strictly Michigan treats delivery.
Michigan is the strongest delivery-precondition state in the fifty-one. A designation that is signed, witnessed and valid still does nothing until:
1. a copy reaches the advocate, 2. the advocate signs an acceptance, and 3. the designation is entered in the medical record.
Three steps, and the statute does not care that the document is perfect. This is the clearest case in the set for the honest claim — not findability, not convenience: the document must arrive, and it must arrive before the moment it is needed. Michigan is where a card in a wallet stops being a nicety.
(Michigan's six-page depth in this project comes from §§5506–5512; §700.5515, on mental health determinations, and §700.1202 are not captured, so nothing here speaks to those.)