In my experience the most common risk with Powers of Attorney is abuse that doesn’t start until well after the client is preparing their documents with me. We previously covered this timing issue in our Webinar on Powers of Attorney and Elder Abuse (which you can read more about here).
The issue with abuse that isn’t happening now has always been how do we get the clients to pay attention to it? It isn’t happening, they are convinced their family wouldn’t do that, and I don’t know their family so what am I talking about?
What decisions does the client need to make in the appointment? What decisions can we send them home to make? Does the client need to accept that their family will fight or can we take a different path? More importantly, how do we get them to engage with any of this when they truly did not come to the appointment ready to think about dependence on anyone, or loss of their emotional or mental clarity?
This Webinar will be run on Tuesday 2 June 2026 at 1pm AEST, it will cost $100 per person. We will run through a few scenarios for the Initial Consultation, including having a consultation that is only focused on Powers of Attorney and Appointments of Enduring Guardian, or for the more generalist approach we will look at what you could do if you wanted to cover those documents in half of the initial appointment.
As we covered in the previous Webinar on POAs and Elder Abuse (which you can still get the past papers for here), the timing of the abuse, or the problem, will impact what the appropriate response is.
If the adult child does not move in with the parent until after preparation of the Power of Attorney, particularly in circumstances where the client insists that they won’t have a child come and live with them, then how can we protect a client from that risk? Can we protect a client from that risk? The client probably meant it when they said that they wouldn’t have the child come and live with them, but they change their mind when they are faced with the real prospect of Aged Care. I think that we can, though it involves having more than a peripheral conversation about aging and medical needs.
It isn’t just abuse
We aren’t just worried about abuse though. We know that many clients are forced into Aged Care at the last minute, with little choice due to the urgency. We also see clients who haven’t thought through what would happen if they were still living with their spouse, and one of them needs high end care and the other one does not qualify. How would they fund that choice?
So much of the case law is started with this very story, one needs care and the other does not. The family may be opportunistic, or they may be doing their best with very limited information. Either way, with very limited information about what the client wanted beyond five different recollections of a short verbal conversation, how can anyone help the family to navigate this mess?
If we could only get the clients to think this through now, when they have energy and time and clarity, and then write those plans down we could avoid so much of this difficulty. But how do you get clients to meaningfully engage?
The CPD Event
This Webinar will run for an hour on Tuesday 2 June 2026 at 1pm AEST and hopefully we will have time to discuss some real life examples. Once you have registered you are welcome to put real life examples to me before the Webinar so that I can include them. It will cost $100 per person to attend, and we will work through a few different approaches to getting clients to take these decisions seriously.
In keeping with previous CPDs, you will get a $50 discount code if you email a requisition from the Supreme Court in relation to an Estate matter and provide enough information for the requisition to make sense. I will bundle them together and they will form part of the subject matter material available to participants. Email it to janis@janisconsults.com and then I will send you the discount code and a survey for you to complete with further questions. If you give me two requisitions you could attend for free.
If you have any questions then please reach out to me at janis@janisconsults.com
NSW Estate Lawyers Facebook Group
Did you know about the free Facebook Group? This is a group for NSW Estate Lawyers to discuss things that are particular to practising Estate law in this State. Here are some examples of things we might discuss -
(1) I have an overseas death certificate, it doesn’t fit the questions in the online system, has anyone else had this problem?
(2) Does anybody have better contact details for ABC bank?
(3) I have a Will where the parties divorced (so the Executor has since divorced the deceased), but the online system doesn’t seem to give me the option to respond with divorced (only deceased), what should I do?
Of course more recently there is a lot of discussion about pragmatic issues with the new online system. We might also share the occasional post that only other lawyers who practice in this area will appreciate. The idea is to help and support each other, and share information that is helpful.
If you would like to join you can just search for “NSW Estate Lawyers” in groups on Facebook, please make sure that you answer the questions.
