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Best practice to prevent elder financial abuse – Australian Bar Review article
For years I’ve been preaching about the need for lawyers to observe Best Practice with Estate Planning to help prevent elder financial abuse of clients. I blogged about it in 2017, in four separate posts:
1. Safeguards to reduce Elder Abuse (Setting up the meeting), which was blogged on 5 October 2017,
2. More safeguards to reduce Elder Abuse (Conducting the meeting), which was blogged on 17 October 2017,
3. Still more safeguards to reduce Elder Abuse (Asking open questions), which was blogged on 1 November 2017, and
4. Further Safeguards to reduce Elder Abuse (Keeping records), which was blogged on 27 November 2017.
I managed to convince the Law Society of NSW of the merits of these safeguards. In 2018 they published an abridged version on their website.
A longer article on which these blogs and Guidelines were based has now been published in the prestigious Australian Bar Review: (2020) 48 Aust Bar Review 249. This is just a taster:
With an ageing and generally affluent population, there are greater prospects of elder financial abuse. By adopting sound procedures, the legal profession can act to prevent this abuse. This article explores the best actions that legal practitioners can take from the first engagement to the long-term retention of records. In its 2017 report, Elder Abuse: A National Legal Response, the Australian Law Reform Commission’s proposed that best practice guidelines be developed for legal practitioners in relation to the preparation and execution of wills and other advance planning documents. The guidelines were part of the Commission’s recommendations about measures to address elder abuse
