Tag: Handbook update

The first quarterly update to the 5th Edition of the Court of Protection Handbook is now available on the Handbook website.

A reminder also of the training event to be held on 4 February 2026, at which our expert panel Alex Ruck Keene KC (Hon), Sophy Miles, Laura Mannering, and Kate Edwards will guide you through a 90-minute session offering practical guidance on three critical areas for practitioners:

• Closed Materials Guidance – Understanding its scope and application.
• A Deputy’s Role and Recent Case Law – The implications of Riddle v NA [2025] EWCOP 39 (T3) and what it means for deputies.
• Enforcing COP Orders – Managing enforcement challenges, including police involvement and forced entry.

The session will end with an interactive Q&A session.

Designed for those working in the Court of Protection, this session is designed to keep you ahead of the curve and demonstrate how the Handbook continues to evolve between editions.

To book, please see here (note that this is not a free event – apologies for the previous suggestion that it was, although delegates will also receive a code for 10% off the book so…)

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!

The August 2024 quarterly update to the Court of Protection Handbook is now available on the Handbook website, including such matters as post-death costs for deputies, the enforcement powers of the Court of Protection and which decisions are for clinicians, and which for judges.

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.

The quarterly update to the Court of Protection Handbook is now available on the Handbook website, including costs on appeals from the Court of Protection, a helpful set of guidance documents for making and using LPAs, and medical evidence of mental disorder .

The quarterly update to the Court of Protection Handbook is now available on the Handbook website, including how to deal with the ‘two P’ situation, the costs of appeals in welfare cases, and transparency and ‘cooling off’ periods.

The quarterly update to the Court of Protection Handbook is now available on the Handbook website, including details of guidance relating to closed hearings, e-bills for costs in certain cases, updated statements of truth and more.

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.

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.

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.