04, Fourth door
Lasting Powers of Attorney, done properly. Before you need them.
The moment you actually need an LPA is the moment you can't make one. We draft, register and store them for individuals, couples and business owners, so the paperwork is waiting when life stops being predictable.
Which of these sounds like you?
The six things most LPAs get wrong
They don't exist at all, and “next of kin” is a myth.
The commonest LPA mistake is not having one, on the assumption that a spouse or “next of kin” can simply take over. They can't. Banks freeze sole accounts on incapacity; hospitals will consult your family but relatives have no legal authority to manage your money or to consent to or refuse treatment on your behalf. Marriage doesn't grant it. “Next of kin” has no standing in law at all. An LPA is the only document that lets someone you choose step in, and it has to be in place before capacity is lost.
They leave it too late.
You have to have mental capacity to make an LPA. The moment you've lost it, stroke, dementia diagnosis, serious accident, is the moment your family can no longer make one for you. Their only option then is a Deputyship application to the Court of Protection: 6-12 months, several thousand pounds, ongoing supervision. An LPA takes 8-10 weeks to register and costs a fraction. Do it while it's boring paperwork.
They confuse the LPA with an Advance Decision.
A Health & Welfare LPA lets an attorney make decisions for you when you can't. An Advance Decision (sometimes called a living will) lets you refuse specific treatment in advance. DNACPR forms and ReSPECT plans are clinical records, not legal documents. All four can coexist. All four do different things. Most kits sell you one and let you think it covers the others.
They pick the wrong attorneys, or don't understand how they act.
Jointly, jointly and severally, or jointly for some decisions and jointly and severally for others, the choice materially changes how the LPA works. “Jointly” for everything sounds safe but locks up the whole LPA if one attorney dies, goes abroad, or falls out. Most attorneys should act jointly and severally. We explain the trade-offs plainly.
They forget the business.
If you own or run a company and lose capacity, your personal LPA attorneys, usually your spouse, will suddenly find themselves being asked to sign contracts, approve payroll, and make commercial decisions they never signed up for. A dedicated Business Owner LPA appointing a co-director or senior colleague is the standard fix. Most solicitors don't offer it. We do.
They aren't reviewed by a solicitor.
The OPG rejects roughly 15% of LPAs on first submission, usually for silly, fixable reasons: signing sections in the wrong order, a witness who can't be a witness, an instruction that conflicts with the powers granted, a section left blank. A rejected LPA can't be salvaged, you file a fresh one and pay the £92 fee again. A solicitor sign-off avoids all of this.
Built the way an LPA should be built.
Guided questionnaire
You fill in an intelligent form on your phone or laptop, at your own pace. It asks the right questions in plain English, explains anything you don't recognise, and adapts to your situation, including the life-sustaining treatment question, the joint-vs-jointly-and-severally choice, and the fee-help routing. No jargon. No blank OPG forms.
Live sense-checking
As you go, our system flags things that would get you rejected by the Office of the Public Guardian: an attorney who's under 18, a certificate provider who's related to you, instructions that conflict with the powers, a business LPA that hasn't been checked against the articles. Nothing goes into your LPA that shouldn't be there.
Solicitor sign-off
A qualified Bonsai Law solicitor personally reviews every LPA before it goes back to you for signing. The AI supports the review; it doesn't do the review. You get the draft LPA(s), plain-English signing instructions, any notification letters (LP3), and, where you qualify, the fee-remission application (LPA120), usually within 5 working days.
Same tokenised link, same conditional-logic engine we use for our wills and our shareholders' agreements. If you've done one of those with us, this will feel familiar.
For your money.
A Financial LPA is the one you're most likely to need first, and the one that saves your family the most grief.
A Financial LPA (form LP1F) lets your chosen attorneys deal with your money and property. Once it's registered by the Office of the Public Guardian, it can be used at any time, including while you still have full mental capacity, if you want the help. Handy if you're travelling, in hospital short-term, or just want someone else running the admin. You can also restrict it so it only kicks in once you've lost capacity, your choice, made in the LPA itself.
Attorneys can pay bills, run bank accounts, deal with pensions and investments, sell property, deal with HMRC and DWP, and handle almost any financial decision you could make yourself. What they can't do: change your will, make large gifts beyond birthdays and Christmas, or benefit themselves from your money.
The single most important structural choice in a financial LPA. Joint means all attorneys must agree and sign every decision, safe-feeling but fragile. Jointly and severally means any one attorney can act alone, flexible but requires trust between them. Mixed means specified decisions joint (usually big-ticket property or gift decisions), everything else jointly and severally.
If you appoint attorneys jointly and one of them dies, goes abroad, becomes bankrupt or loses capacity themselves, the whole LPA fails unless you've appointed replacements. Jointly and severally survives this. We explain the trade-off for your specific attorneys and default to jointly and severally with replacement attorneys unless there's a reason not to.
You can appoint up to four replacement attorneys who step in if a primary attorney can't act. You can add preferences (guidance, not binding, “I'd prefer my house isn't sold while my sister is living in it”) and instructions (binding, “my attorneys must obtain valuations from two estate agents before selling my house”). The line between guidance and instruction is where OPG rejections cluster; we draft both to survive review.
Send an enquiry
Tell us what you need.
A solicitor reads every enquiry and replies personally, usually within one working day. No call centre, no chatbot.
For your care, your body, your voice.
A Health & Welfare LPA is the one families forget until a hospital corridor conversation makes it urgent.
A Health & Welfare LPA (form LP1H) can only be used once you have lost mental capacity to make the specific decision in question. It doesn't switch on all at once, it applies decision by decision, whenever capacity is missing.
Attorneys can decide where you live (including moves into residential care), day-to-day care, medical treatment, refusal of specific treatments, contact with family and friends, and diet. What they can't do: override an Advance Decision you've validly made, force treatment on you against a capacitous refusal, or authorise anything unlawful.
This is the section of the LP1H most people don't realise they're answering. You choose one of two options:
Option A: your attorneys can give or refuse consent to life-sustaining treatment on your behalf. They step into your shoes.
Option B: your attorneys cannot make this decision, the doctors do, in your best interests, and your attorneys are consulted but not deciding.
There is no default. If you leave this section blank the LPA is rejected. It's a decision about who you want holding the pen at the hardest possible moment. We walk you through it in the questionnaire, in plain English, before you commit.
These do very different things and most kits blur them. A Health & Welfare LPA appoints someone to decide for you, based on their view of what you'd want, and is legally binding once registered. An Advance Decision to Refuse Treatment (ADRT) is you refusing specific treatments in advance, in your own words, while you have capacity. A DNACPR is a clinical decision recorded by doctors refusing CPR specifically. A ReSPECT plan is a clinical care-planning document that guides emergency clinicians but isn't legally binding by itself.
Most people want a combination: an LP1H so someone you trust holds the pen for the many decisions no advance document can predict, and an ADRT for the specific treatments you already know you'd refuse. We can prepare both, and build the drafting to keep them coherent where they overlap.
You can name up to five people who should be told when the LPA is being registered, usually close family who aren't attorneys, so they can raise a concern if they think the LPA shouldn't go through. It's a check against undue influence. If you name people, we generate the LP3 notification letters as part of the pack. If you'd rather not name anyone, you can appoint a second certificate provider instead, we explain the trade-off in the questionnaire.
Send an enquiry
Tell us what you need.
A solicitor reads every enquiry and replies personally, usually within one working day. No call centre, no chatbot.
For when the business can't wait for you.
If you run a company, your personal LPA is the wrong tool for signing contracts. This is the right one.
Your personal Financial LPA appoints attorneys, usually your spouse, to run your personal finances. If you own or run a business and lose capacity, your spouse suddenly finds themselves being asked to approve payroll runs, sign supplier contracts, deal with commercial banking, and make decisions about a business they may not know intimately. That's not fair on them, and it's not good for the business.
A Business Owner LPA is a second LP1F, made under the same statutory framework, but restricted by scope to your business assets and decisions, and appointing different attorneys, a co-director, business partner, or senior colleague who understands the company. Business continuity insurance in legal form.
This is where the Business Owner LPA lives or dies at OPG review. Our template appoints your business attorneys “in relation solely to my role as director/shareholder/member/partner of [Company Name] (company number [X])” and specifies the decisions they can and can't make, with any reserved matters carved out to your personal attorneys.
We draft this from a Bonsai template that we've built to survive OPG review, populated with your company details from the questionnaire. No blank fields, no free-text roulette.
Your company's articles of association and any shareholders' agreement may already restrict what a shareholder's attorney can do, for example requiring board consent before an attorney exercises voting rights, or triggering pre-emption if the shareholder loses capacity. If we don't check them, the LPA can end up granting powers the company won't recognise.
As part of every Business Owner LPA instruction we review your articles and shareholders' agreement, flag anything that conflicts, and, where necessary, advise on amendments or board resolutions to make the LPA workable in practice. This isn't optional; it's the point.
The Business Owner LPA is in addition to your personal LP1F and LP1H, not instead. Most business-owner clients take all three, personal financial, personal health & welfare, and business, as a bundle. We discount the combined fee to make that the easy choice.
Send an enquiry
Tell us what you need.
A solicitor reads every enquiry and replies personally, usually within one working day. No call centre, no chatbot.
What you get.
Included in every LPA
- Your LPA(s), drafted from the OPG's own PDF templates and reviewed by a qualified solicitor
- Plain-English signing instructions covering the signing order (donor, certificate provider, attorneys, applicant), who can and can't witness, and what to do when
- LP3 notification letters, pre-addressed to the people you've named
- LPA120 fee remission application, where you qualify (exempt or 50% remission)
- Personalised summary explaining what your LPA does and doesn't cover
- Submission to the Office of the Public Guardian on your behalf (optional)
- Storage of the original in the Bonsai Law vault (optional, free for retained clients)
- A calendar reminder in three years to review
Health & Welfare tier adds
- Section 5 (life-sustaining treatment) walkthrough and decision record
- Advance Decision (ADRT) drafting where you want one alongside the LPA
- Coordination note if you already hold a ReSPECT plan or DNACPR
Business Owner tier adds
- Bonsai-authored Section 7 scope statement, populated with your company details
- Review of your articles of association and any shareholders' agreement
- Flagged incompatibilities and, where needed, a note of board resolutions or amendments required
- Coordination with your personal LPAs to avoid overlap
Fixed fees. Nothing hidden.
Financial LPA only (LP1F)
from£395+ VAT
Personal financial attorneys, drafted, reviewed, signed off, registered.
Start the conversationHealth & Welfare LPA only (LP1H)
from£450+ VAT
Includes the Section 5 walkthrough and, optionally, an Advance Decision drafted alongside.
Start the conversationBoth personal LPAs (LP1F + LP1H)
from£695+ VAT
The usual pair. Discounted combined fee, a £150 saving on the two bought separately.
Start the conversationBusiness Owner LPA only
from£995+ VAT
Scope-restricted LP1F for your directorship or shareholding, plus articles and shareholders' agreement review.
Start the conversationFull personal set + Business Owner
from£1,395+ VAT
LP1F + LP1H + Business Owner LPA. The proper belt-and-braces, and £295 off the parts bought separately.
Start the conversationCouples, mirror pairs of any tier
For couples doing matching LPAs. We ask twice, once for each of you, with "same as my partner" toggles.
Mirror couples pricing applies when both donors instruct together at the same tier. The Business Owner LPA is a single-donor product and priced individually within the full-set mirror.
Start the conversationGovernment fees are separate. The Office of the Public Guardian charges £92 per LPA to register (£184 for a personal pair). If your income is less than £12,000 or you receive a qualifying benefit, you pay less or nothing at all, the questionnaire calculates this and generates the LPA120 for you.
All Bonsai fees are quoted before you start. No hourly rates. OPG fees are a pass-through and shown separately at the start of the questionnaire. A standalone Advance Decision drafted separately from an LPA is handled sensitively as a bespoke matter, through our Estate Planning Review (£295 + VAT). The Estate Planning Review is estate-planning advice, and any credit runs against a Wills or Combined Wills + LPA instruction, not against LPA fees.
Human-drafted. Machine-checked. Solicitor-signed.
We use AI throughout the process, not to write your LPA, but to make sure the LPA we draft actually does what you asked and won't get rejected by the OPG. Every answer you give is checked in real time for internal consistency. Every draft is read back to you in plain English before you sign. Every file is reviewed by a qualified Bonsai Law solicitor.
Our AI runs on Anthropic's commercial service. Its terms bar it from training its models on your instructions, and it deletes them automatically within 30 days. The Solicitors Regulation Authority requires human oversight on legal work, and so do we, the AI supports us, it doesn't replace us.
Not sure where to start?
Start with an Estate Planning Review.
A 45 minute meeting with a solicitor, held by video or phone once you have completed our interactive questionnaire, followed by a written inheritance tax position note and a clear recommendation. A fixed £295 for one person, or £425 for a couple reviewed together, and half the review fee comes off if you go on to instruct a Wills or combined Wills and LPA package within 30 days: £147.50 after a single review, £212.50 after a joint review. It is not credited against LPA-only work.
Questions, answered.
An LPA rarely stands alone
Wills
The natural pair. An LPA covers you while you're alive but can't decide; a will covers what happens after. Most clients do both together.
ExploreShareholders' Agreements
If you own a business, your Business Owner LPA has to work alongside your articles and shareholders' agreement. We check both as part of the instruction.
ExploreHow we use AI
Plain English on the AI behind our drafting, how your data is handled, human oversight, and what the AI can and can't do.
ExploreDo it while it's boring paperwork.
Fifteen minutes on the questionnaire tonight. A solicitor's draft on your desk next week. LPAs in the drawer, waiting.
Further reading
Official guidance
Prefer to read the source first? These are the government's own pages. General information, not advice on your situation, but a sound place to start.
Regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA No. 8000734). This page is marketing material and not legal advice. An LPA drafted through this service is legal work carried out under a formal retainer with Bonsai Law. LPAs are registered with the Office of the Public Guardian; fees payable to the OPG are separate from Bonsai Law's fees and shown at the start of the questionnaire.