Lasting Powers of Attorney Solicitors in Plymouth

They are legal document which give powers appointing someone else to manage your affairs if you become too unwell in the future to manage them yourself. There are two kinds, one covering financial affairs and one covering health and welfare decisions.

Anything that you own can be included in a financial decision, which includes your property and savings, and might also include any business that you might own or have a share of, it includes all your personal possessions and any outstanding loans. Your attorney can do anything with your financial arrangements that you can, except make significant gifts.

Any medical decision about any form of treatment or drug therapy, including the right to refuse medication or treatment. Social care decisions include what you wear, what you eat and who visits you. An important decision is where you live, including whether you go into a care home and if so, which one.

Our cancer misdiagnosis lawyers in Plymouth will do all they can to understand the impact that the delay or misdiagnosis has had on your cancer's development. It’s vital to then understand how this has impacted your life as well as those around you.

If you’ve had to pay for extra medical treatment, medication or take time off of work, then these can all put you under financial strain at a time when you really don’t need that.

As part of your claim, we would aim to cover all of the out-of-pocket expenses caused by the negligence you suffered. This can even include things like accommodation and travel costs.

Finally, we’ll also take into consideration the impact that the negligence has had on your social life and career.

There is a separate question about life-sustaining treatment, such treatment can include CPR, food and fluid, medication, admission to the hospital or antibiotics. It is any kind of treatment that sustains life. You can choose to allow your attorneys to make this decision on your behalf or not.

Yes, you can appoint your ‘original’ Attorney(s) in the first instance, and then ‘replacement’ attorneys (if something were to happen to your first set of attorneys). It is advisable to appoint more than one attorney, or to have replacement attorneys if you only have one original attorney, to ensure you still have someone to care for you, if something should happen to your main attorney/s.

If you have more than one attorney or replacement attorney, they can act either jointly which means that all of your attorneys must agree (which can be inconvenient) or jointly and severally, which means that any one of your attorneys can act on their own. If you specify it, you can have a hybrid of this, where some decisions are jointly and some are jointly and severally, you need to stipulate which decisions are to be made either way.

An LPA usually takes 2-4 weeks to prepare and have signed by all your chosen attorneys and replacement attorneys. Technically the LPA is not created and should not be used until the date that it is registered at the Office of the Public Guardian, which can take 4-5 months after the document is signed by the donor and the attorneys.

As long as your proposed attorneys are over the age of 18, there is no time when it is too soon to create them, but if you were to have an unexpected illness or accident, it could be too late. They don’t need to be used immediately after they are created and putting your LPAs in place ahead of when they are needed is an excellent way of making sure your affairs are in order. Think of LPAs like insurance; it is much better to have them in place, registered and ready to be used if they are ever needed in the future.

If you became unwell or lost mental capacity without preparing LPAs, your family would be forced to apply to the Court of Protection for a deputyship order, which takes much longer than the registration of an LPA (9-12 months) and costs more money in both legal fees and registration fees. There are also ongoing bond and supervision costs with deputyship, which are not incurred with LPAs.