How to Choose Your LPA Attorney: The Complete Decision Guide

The decision that outweighs the paperwork

Everything else in an LPA is form-filling. This is the part that is actually a decision: who acts for you when you cannot act for yourself. First, the reassuring correction: an attorney is not a lawyer. The word just means a person authorised to act for you, and for most people it means a spouse, an adult child or a trusted friend.

The legal minimum

An attorney must be 18 or over and have mental capacity, and for a property and financial affairs LPA they cannot be an undischarged bankrupt. That is the whole legal test. The real test is harder.

The real test

Trust, without a footnote. This person could have access to everything. The blunt question that clarifies most choices: would you hand them your bank card and PIN today? If there is a hesitation, listen to it.

Reliability over affection. The kindest member of the family is not always the one who answers letters, keeps records and chases a bank through three phone calls. Financial attorneys do paperwork; welfare attorneys deal with hospitals and social services. Choose for the job.

For health decisions: someone who knows your mind. A welfare attorney may one day weigh treatment options, care homes, even life-sustaining treatment. Choose the person most able to answer "what would they have wanted?" accurately. Then make it easy for them by actually telling them what you would want.

Practicalities. Age and geography matter. An attorney twenty years older than you may need replacing at exactly the wrong moment; one who lives abroad can act, but slowly. Neither is disqualifying. Both are worth weighing.

One attorney or several?

A single attorney is simple and fast, but fragile: if they die, lose capacity or fall out with you, the LPA can fail. Most people appoint two or more, and then must choose how they act:

• Jointly: every decision needs every attorney. Maximum oversight, minimum resilience: if one attorney goes, the whole arrangement can collapse.
• Jointly and severally: any attorney can act alone. This is what most families choose, because it survives holidays, illness and death, and lets the practical work fall to whoever is nearest.
• Jointly for some decisions, severally for others: possible, but the boundary needs very careful wording, and badly drafted hybrid arrangements are a known source of rejections and disputes.

Whatever you choose, name a replacement attorney. It is the cheapest insurance in the whole document.

Family politics, faced honestly

Appointing one child and not another is a message, whether you mean it as one or not. If you have reasons (one lives nearby, one is good with money) say them out loud to everyone at once, before the forms are signed. Appointing all children jointly and severally avoids favouritism at the cost of requiring cooperation; it works in families that already cooperate and fails in families that do not. The form cannot fix a relationship, and the OPG sees the fallout when people try.

A professional attorney, a solicitor acting for a fee, is worth considering when there is genuinely no suitable person, or when family conflict is certain. More on attorney duties, so you know what you are asking of whoever you choose.

Before you decide, ask them

Being an attorney is work, sometimes years of it. Ask the person, tell them what the role involves, and take their hesitation seriously; a reluctant attorney is little better than none. Then put the names on the form: it is free, and an estate planner will talk the whole arrangement through with you before you sign.