Maybe it's advocate, not surrogate. Near the beginning, there was a man who overlooked Terri's interests but Michael?? dismissed him?
Thanks for your help.
A guardian ad litem, Richard Pearse.
Basically, the idea is that a guardian ad litem will oppose anything that a guardian wants to do that might conceivably go against the interests of the ward; the guardian must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that his actions are in fact in the ward's best interest.
Unfortunately, guardians ad litem tend to harass good guardians (imposing considerable time and legal expense) while not acting as a terribly-effective check on bad ones. The difficulty is that while guardians ad litem are allowed access to a ward's private files, they are extremely limitted in their ability to interact with other people who might have interests related to the ward.
There are reasons for this; without such restrictions, there would be very little protection for a ward's privacy. Unfortunately, the restrictions put a barrier between those with the authority to look for 'fishiness', and those who would know what to look for.
Of course, since Judge Greer allowed Michael to unlawfully fire Terri's guardian ad litem because he was getting too nosy of his own initiative, that makes the guardian ad litem even less of a check on lawbreaking in this case.