Choosing Your Attorneys

Your attorneys will have more power over your life than almost anyone else. On the financial side, an attorney can walk into your bank, manage your investments, and sign contracts for a property sale. On the health and welfare side, they can pick your care home, consent to medical procedures, and potentially make calls about whether life-sustaining treatment continues. That's an extraordinary amount of power. Hand it to the right person and you've built yourself a genuine safety net. Hand it to the wrong one and the consequences could be severe.

The bar is deliberately low. Anyone aged 18 or over with mental capacity can act as your attorney for a Health and Welfare LPA. For a Property and Financial Affairs LPA, there's one extra condition: they must not be bankrupt or subject to a debt relief order (since they'll be managing money, that makes obvious sense).

You can appoint individuals, and for a Property and Financial Affairs LPA you can also name a trust corporation, though that's uncommon outside larger or more complex estates.

Families tend to draw from a fairly predictable pool, and with good reason.

Partners and spouses land at the top of most people's lists, which makes intuitive sense: who knows you better? The catch is that the person closest to you emotionally may also be the one most destabilised by your decline. Watching a husband or wife lose capacity is devastating, and devastation doesn't lend itself to cool-headed financial or medical judgements.

Grown-up children offer youth (they're likely to outlive you) and familiarity with your values. Multiple adult children? You could split the workload between two of them, or appoint all three with different roles. Just take a hard look at how your kids actually get along before you commit to that structure. If your kids have a track record of butting heads, making them joint attorneys is asking for conflict at exactly the worst moment.

A sibling or close friend brings useful emotional distance. They love you without being quite as tangled up as a partner or child, which can mean clearer thinking when difficult choices land. The downside is practical: they have their own household, their own job, their own commitments.

Solicitors and accountants bring professional competence and objectivity. Fees apply, and the arrangement tends to feel less personal, but for complicated financial estates it's sometimes the smartest option. You'd normally only go this route for the financial LPA, and usually as a joint appointment alongside a family member.

One is the minimum. No upper limit, though two works best for most people.

After settling on the number, you decide the working arrangement:

Jointly means every decision requires agreement from all attorneys. Both have to sign, both have to be present or consulted. Good protection against solo misconduct, but it stalls if one attorney is abroad, in hospital, or just hard to pin down. Worse, if one dies or loses capacity without a named replacement, the whole LPA collapses.

Jointly and severally means any attorney can act independently. This is much more practical for everyday decisions, paying bills, dealing with banks, consenting to routine medical treatment, because one person can handle it without waiting for the other. The oversight is weaker here, so you really do need to trust each person individually.

Then there's the hybrid model. Big-ticket items like a house sale or a care home move need joint agreement. Day-to-day bits, paying bills, renewing a car insurance policy, either attorney handles solo. It's the option most families end up preferring, though the language in the LPA needs to spell out exactly what counts as "major" and what doesn't.

Think of these as understudies. A replacement attorney only steps in if your original attorney can no longer act, whether because they've died, lost capacity, been removed by the OPG, or (for financial LPAs) gone bankrupt.

Without replacements, you're left with a gap. If your sole attorney can't act and there's nobody to replace them, the LPA fails entirely. Your family is back to the Court of Protection. Naming at least one replacement for each attorney appointment is cheap insurance against that scenario.

Trustworthiness tops the list for obvious reasons. Beyond that, look for somebody who's organised enough to handle paperwork and record-keeping, available enough to respond when needed rather than six months later, emotionally steady enough to make hard decisions under pressure, and willing to actually do it, because nobody performs well in a role they accepted reluctantly.

For a financial attorney specifically, some comfort with numbers helps. They don't need to be an accountant, but managing bank accounts, chasing pension providers, and filing tax returns requires a baseline of financial confidence.

For the health and welfare role, emotional intelligence outweighs technical skill. The question they'll face again and again is "what would this person have wanted?", not "what would I want?". Your attorney needs to know you well enough to answer that honestly.

Don't name someone without telling them first. Springing the role on somebody after the document is already signed is unfair to everyone. Sit down, lay out what you're asking and why, and then step back. Rushing this conversation defeats its purpose. Some candidates will agree straight away. Others will want a week to think, which is entirely reasonable for something this weighty. And the occasional "no thanks" is worth its weight in gold, because a reluctant attorney is a liability.

Check, too, that the specific type of decision sits comfortably with them. Managing money is one thing. Making end-of-life medical decisions is quite another. A person who's happy managing your bank accounts might baulk at making end-of-life medical choices, and vice versa. That's exactly why the two types of LPA exist and why you can name different people for each.

As long as you still have mental capacity, tearing up the LPA and starting fresh is straightforward. People emigrate, relationships evolve, health declines. Reviewing your attorney choices every few years, alongside your Will, is sensible practice.

Our LPA service lets you name your attorneys, choose how they work together, and add replacements, all through guided questions that explain each option in plain language.