Handbook update – Court of Protection Handbook

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.

Court of Protection Handbook – August 2020 Quarterly Update

The quarterly update on the COPH website to the third edition of the Handbook is now out, bringing the book up-to-date to 1 August 2020. The next update will be due on 1 November 2020 (and if people ask very nicely, the good people at Legal Action Group and the authors may even be able to start thinking about a fourth edition of the book).

Court of Protection Handbook- first quarterly update and new precedent letters

The first quarterly update to the Court of Protection Handbook can now be found here. Although it is primarily of use for those in possession of the Third Edition (and if you are not, you should be!) it is also of use as a summary of case-law relating to practice and procedure since the book was published in July 2019.

With huge thanks to Michelle Pratley, the site now also includes a fully updated and comprehensive sample letter of instruction to a psychiatrist to report upon decision-making capacity in a number of domain, together with a letter completed upon the basis of a (fictional scenario).

We’ve come over all pink – the revised 1st edition of the COPH now out!

We are delighted to announce that a revised first edition of the Court of Protection Handbook is now available, in a frisky pink. It contains the Court of Protection Rules as amended by the 2015 changes, updated precedent orders, and supplementary commentary highlighting the key changes brought about the 2015 rules changes. It is available from the LAG bookshop, for £55.

For those of you who already own the book, you can get a supplement – free! – including all the new material, by emailing lag@lag.org.uk. There are also a limited number of free copies of the supplement available to all comers at the same email address.

Do also remember to visit the COPH website for updates to the main body of the book and all sorts of useful other material such as downloadable (free) Word versions of precedent orders and PDs that are actually locatable (by contrast with the position on the .gov website).