Top 4 reasons to appoint a solicitor to help with your Lasting Power of Attorney

A Lasting Power of Attorney is a legal document that allows you to appoint one or more individuals to make decisions on your behalf should you lose mental capacity for any reason. This is an important document, and one that should be prepared carefully in order to ensure that it is fully valid should you ever need to make use of the document in later life. 

 

In order to ensure that the Lasting Power of Attorney is completely valid and conforms to the rules and regulations in place, you should always seek the assistance of a specialist Lasting Powers of Attorney solicitor to work with you on the document. 

 

Below, our expert Wills and Probate solicitors specialist in Lasting Power of Attorneys discuss why it is important to appoint a specialist legal expert to help with your LPA. 

It is easy to assume that working with a solicitor will prolong the process, and that it will be faster and more time-efficient to complete the forms online yourself. However, this is never the case. The LPA documentation has to be signed and completed 100% accurately, with no mistakes, in order to be accepted by the Office of the Public Guardian when it is submitted. Every single Lasting Power of Attorney must pass through this check, or it will be rejected and may need to be amended or re-signed before resubmission. This means that your LPA will take longer to register, than if you had instructed a local solicitor specialising in drafting Lasting Powers of Attorney.  

 

With the documents being over 20 pages long altogether, it is no surprise that a huge number of applications include small mistakes, no matter how much people think they have checked them over. When you appoint the help of a specialist Lasting Power of Attorney solicitor with your application, you can rest assured that the documents will be professionally checked before being submitted, preventing any delays. 

When preparing a Lasting Power of Attorney, there are a number of other legal documents that may have to be considered, including a separate Lasting Power of Attorney document for any businesses that you own or business interests that you may have. 

 

Our specialist Wills and Probate solicitors can advise as to whether this is necessary, and how this process should be done in the best way to prevent any problems further down the line. 

While many people simply think of a Lasting Power of Attorney document as appointing an individual to make your financial or healthcare decisions should you lose mental capacity, a specialist solicitor will take it one step further than this. Our Wills and Probate solicitors often work with our clients to include safeguard clauses to the powers included in the document. 

 

This could encompass many things, including consulting a professional such as your Accountant or Financial Advisor before making certain decisions. This allows you, as the donor, to limit the power to the appointed Attorney names in the document and prevent them making unwise decisions. 

On top of being rejected for errors in the form itself, many Lasting Power of Attorney documents are rejected for being invalid in the way that they are worded and phrased. The document must be worded in a specific way, in line with specific wording and language regulations in the eyes of the law. Because of this, people who attempt to prepare the document on their own can often mistakenly draft a document that is invalid and is rejected by the Office of the Public Guardian on these grounds. 

 

 

To speak to one of our specialist Lasting Power of Attorney solicitors about how we can help you today, get in touch online, here, or email us at enquiries@mglegal.co.uk .