How to Choose the Right Attorneys for Your LPA

A Will covers what happens after you die. An LPA is a different thing entirely. It deals with what happens while you're still alive but can't speak for yourself. Sit with that for a second. Someone else choosing how your money gets spent. Deciding where you live. Saying yes or no to medical treatment on your behalf. Picking whether you stay at home or move into a care facility.

Get the right person in that role and you've got genuine peace of mind. Get it wrong, honestly, and you could be stuck with decisions you'd never have made yourself. The job might last a single year. It might stretch to two decades or longer. This guide goes through everything you should weigh up before putting a name on that form. Who's legally allowed to do it, what actually matters when you're choosing, how to structure the appointment, and why a proper conversation beforehand is worth more than any legal clause you could draft.

What your attorney ends up doing day to day depends on which type of LPA you're setting up.

A Property and Financial Affairs LPA gives someone control over the money side of your life. We're talking bank accounts, pension income, selling property, managing investments, filing tax returns. You can let them act straight away, which is handy if illness or mobility problems make it hard to get to a branch. Or you can limit their powers so they only kick in when you've lost mental capacity.

Then there's the Health and Welfare version. This covers the personal stuff. Whether you go into a care home or get looked after at home. Whether you consent to a particular surgery. What you eat. Whether you turn up to the family Christmas gathering or stay put. This LPA only activates once you genuinely cannot make a specific decision yourself. And look, if you've ticked the life-sustaining treatment box, your attorney could one day be answering questions about ventilators, resuscitation, and feeding tubes. Most of us can barely think about that in the abstract. Now imagine doing it in a hospital corridor while someone you love is lying in the next room.

The bar is lower than most people expect, honestly. You need to be 18 or older and have mental capacity. For the Health and Welfare LPA, that's genuinely it. Property and Financial Affairs adds one extra rule: the person can't be bankrupt or subject to a debt relief order. Which makes sense when you think about it, given they'd be looking after your finances.

No legal qualifications needed. No requirement to be a relative. Living abroad doesn't rule someone out either, though it does create practical headaches when something needs a physical signature or the bank wants someone standing at the counter.

Start with trust. Not the casual "I trust them to water my plants" kind. Proper, deep trust. Your attorney is going to see your bank balances, your medical records, possibly the inside of your home at a point when you're not able to object. If handing someone your bank card and PIN would give you even a moment's pause, don't hand them a power of attorney.

After that, think about how they hold up under pressure. The situations that come up won't be calm ones. A parent's rapid cognitive decline. A bank needing urgent authorisation before close of business. A consultant asking for a treatment decision right now, today, in the next hour. Can this person think straight when everything around them is falling apart?

For health and welfare specifically, understanding your values is the whole game. The question your attorney keeps coming back to is "what would they have wanted?" And the only way to answer that properly is to actually know the person. Really know them. You want someone who's heard you talk about care homes. About what quality of life means to you. About which treatments you'd accept and which ones you wouldn't. Someone who respects those views even when they'd personally choose something different.

There's also the unglamorous business of admin. Pension paperwork, letters from the bank, HMRC forms, council tax queries. If the person you're considering regularly misplaces their own gas bill, they're probably going to struggle with yours too.

And here's one that people forget about: have you actually asked them? Being named as attorney is a genuine commitment. Some people will feel honoured by it. Others will feel overwhelmed, or quietly anxious. Better to find that out before the document gets signed rather than after.

One attorney keeps things simple. But it's fragile. If that person dies, relocates overseas, or falls ill themselves, the entire LPA collapses unless you've named replacements.

Two attorneys is the practical sweet spot for most families. But then you've got to decide how they work together, and this is where it gets interesting.

"Jointly" means they must agree on every single decision. Good for accountability. Terrible for speed, particularly when one attorney is on holiday and the gas bill needs paying. There's a bigger risk too: if one joint attorney can no longer act, the whole arrangement falls apart unless replacements are already in place.

"Jointly and severally" means either attorney can act alone. Far more practical for the everyday stuff like paying bills or consenting to routine medical treatment. The trade-off is less oversight. You're relying on each person's honesty and judgement individually, without the other one checking their work.

There's a middle path as well. You can require joint agreement for the big calls (selling the house, choosing a care home) while letting either attorney handle the routine admin (paying electricity, renewing car insurance) on their own. This tends to work best in practice, honestly. But the LPA itself needs to spell out very clearly what counts as "big" and what counts as "routine." Vague wording here is a recipe for arguments later on.

Think of replacements as your safety net. They step in only when an original attorney dies, loses capacity, goes bankrupt (relevant for a financial LPA), or gets removed by the Office of the Public Guardian. Without a replacement lined up, losing a primary attorney means the whole LPA falls over. Your family would then need to go through the Court of Protection, which is slow, stressful, and not cheap.

Give your replacement choices the same level of thought as the primary ones. Same criteria: trust, capability, willingness. A common setup is naming your partner as the primary attorney, with your eldest child waiting in the wings as replacement. Or you might have two adult children sharing the primary role, backed up by a sibling or a long-standing friend.

Solicitors and accountants can act as attorneys, usually on the financial side. They earn their fees when the situation is genuinely complicated. A business that needs managing or winding down. Property held in different countries. Inheritance tax planning where specialist knowledge really matters. Their fees come out of your estate, and the relationship will feel more transactional than personal. But in the right circumstances, honestly, that professional distance is a benefit rather than a drawback.

A popular arrangement is appointing a family member alongside a solicitor. Your family member brings the personal relationship, the regular visits, the knowledge of what you'd want. The solicitor handles the financial heavy lifting, the compliance bits, the tax returns. You get warmth and expertise in one package.

Your two LPAs are separate documents. There's nothing stopping you from naming completely different people for each one. And often that's the right call.

Here's a common scenario. Your daughter is brilliant when it comes to health and welfare decisions. She knows what matters to you, visits regularly, has a decent relationship with your GP. But spreadsheets make her eyes glaze over. She'd rather do anything than ring the bank. Your son, on the other hand, works with numbers all day long. He reads pension statements the way most people read a menu. But he lives three hours away and can't easily sit in on a hospital appointment.

So you put your daughter on the Health and Welfare LPA. Your son goes on Property and Financial Affairs. Each person ends up doing what they're genuinely good at, which is the whole point.

Don't spring it on someone at a family gathering. Do it over a quiet cup of tea, one to one. Explain what the role involves. Tell them why you thought of them specifically. Walk them through the kinds of situations that might come up, when the power would start, and what the law actually expects. Then stop talking for a bit and let them process it.

It's worth checking one thing in particular. Are they comfortable with the full scope of it? Someone perfectly happy to manage a pension drawdown might go white at the thought of making end-of-life medical choices. That gap between financial confidence and emotional readiness is exactly why the two separate LPA types exist.

Write your wishes and preferences down somewhere beyond the LPA form itself. A letter of wishes is a practical tool, honestly, and it gives your attorneys real context for the decisions they'll face. Your views on residential care. How you feel about specific medical treatments. How you'd want money spent. It isn't legally binding, but when the moment arrives it can be incredibly useful.

Telling the wider family is sensible too. A brother who discovers at the worst possible moment that he wasn't chosen can carry that resentment for years. A brief, honest explanation now, even a slightly awkward one, causes far less damage than a surprise dropped during a medical crisis.

Write down everyone you'd realistically consider. Then test each name against the criteria above: trust, capability, availability, willingness, understanding of your values. Think about which pairings would actually work if you're appointing jointly. Name at least one replacement for every primary attorney you choose. And have a proper conversation with each person before anything goes on paper.

None of this is permanent while you've still got capacity. You can revoke the whole thing and start fresh whenever you like. People move abroad. Relationships shift. Health changes. Looking at your attorney choices every few years, at the same time you review your Will, is a sensible habit to build.

Who you appoint as attorney shapes who runs your life if you can't run it yourself. Don't rush the decision just because the form is sitting in front of you and you want it done.

Take the time. Have the difficult conversations. Put backups in place. Write your preferences somewhere your attorneys can actually find them when they need to. And come back to the whole question every few years. The person who was spot on for the role in 2026 might not be the right choice by 2031. People change. Circumstances change.

Our online LPA service walks you through attorney selection with clear explanations at each stage. You name your attorneys, decide how they'll work together, add replacements, and set any restrictions or preferences. All of it through guided questions written in plain English.