CoP Handbook – a new edition on the way!

We would normally be publishing an update covering relevant developments over the past 3 months on this page, but the team (with some exciting new additions) are hard at work updating the 4th edition to a new, expanded, 5th edition. So bear with us if the page is not updated – but please do get in touch if you think that there are things that the 5th edition needs to cover, by email to alex.ruckkeene@39essex.com. We can’t promise we will be able to, but now is the time to ask!

Court of Protection Handbook update May 2024


A few days early (next week is particularly busy for me), the May 2024 quarterly update to the Court of Protection Handbook is now available on the Handbook website, including such matters as judicial visits, when to bring serious medical treatment cases to the Court of Protection, when the court can revoke deputyship and fee increases before the court.

Court of Protection Handbook – quarterly update

The first quarterly (1 November 2022) update to the Handbook is now out. It covers relevant case-law since the 4th edition was published, including litigation friends, prior convictions, ‘closed hearings,’ injunctions and the interaction between the Court of Protection and assessors under DoLS.

We should also mark in this update the departure from Legal Action Group of the driving force behind the Handbook, Esther Pilger, who has moved on to pastures new after 20 years. We will miss tremendously her energy, attention to detail and unflappable good cheer.

Court of Protection Quarterly Update – November 2021

The quarterly online update to the Court of Protection Handbook is now available, covering key practice and procedure updates to the text of the main volume. We are also working on publishing the update in hard copy as a one-off inter-edition bonus – work on the next edition cannot properly start until we have more detail about the revisions to the MCA Code of Practice and what is happening with the Liberty Protection Safeguards.

Court of Protection Handbook Quarterly Update – May 2021


The quarterly online update to the Court of Protection Handbook is now available, covering such cases as Re P (Discharge of Party) on when the court can discharge a party of its own motion, Re MN on the limited steps that the court will consider taking under s.48, and Re P (another one) on the ‘white leopard’ of the situation where a person is said to lack capacity to make a medical treatment decision but to have capacity to conduct proceedings about whether to undergo the procedure.