Scratch the surface

Many years ago, a colleague was appointed as attorney for a long-standing client, who was diagnosed with dementia in early 2013 and moved into a care home. The situation has created some everyday and extraordinary challenges for the firm.

First, there was the registration of the client's enduring power of attorney (EPA), which required two medical practitioners to each provide a certificate confirming that the donor had lost capacity. Although this is not an unusual restriction, it delayed progress. Our client had not been dealing with his financial matters at all well for months - cue a number of red reminder letters from utility companies and threats of forced entry to the property.

But the utility companies wouldn't talk to my colleague, me or anyone from the firm in any detail about the accounts because of "data protection". (Strangely, the same companies would, however, have accepted payments from us if we had cash available.)

There are no 'rules' about how to deal with this attitude, but the following approach tends to work:

• Send a certified copy of the unregistered EPA to the company, with certified copy ID for the attorney and clear instructions to stop any action and send all future correspondence to the office.

• But don't address this to customer services. Most utility companies have a team who become involved in cases where complaints aren't resolved at an initial stage. If you can get your correspondence to these instead, you are more likely to succeed. Npower, for example, can be emailed at executive.complaints@npower.com.

A locked metal deeds box found at the property was our next challenge. It was very heavy and there was no key - or, at least, no obvious key from the choice of about 300 all found at the house).

We arranged for a locksmith to come to the office, and found that our client had a veritable treasure chest containing bridges with gold teeth, cufflinks, sovereigns, gold chains, watches and 40 1974 1oz krugerrands (South African gold coins).

The office insurance wouldn't even begin to cover the value of this haul. I have a safe for keeping smaller valuable items in, but the krugerrands alone would be easily worth £28,000. After a few frantic calls to the accounts department and our compliance officer, we had a plan: our bank would take the whole deed box and contents as a safe deposit item. The contents were taken out of the box, photographed and scheduled by me and the compliance officer together.

Having items of property at the office, and especially expensive pieces, can happen a lot in this line of work. ?It is sensible to make sure that there ?is a facility for them to be stored safely and under sufficient insurance cover. I don't think I would have slept well knowing the krugerrands were in ?a filing cabinet somewhere.

Roaring trade

Finally, there was a further unexpected discovery at the client's property: a Victorian tiger skin with full-mount head and teeth, mounted on black felt and back cloth, measuring 10ft 5in from nose to tip of tail. I say 'unexpected' because it fell on me when I opened a wardrobe in the spare bedroom. What market would there be for this monstrosity? Surely no one would want it.

The skin was valued by a local auction house at £900, and placed in a specialist sporting sale where, in fact, it made £3,500 for the client. We were lucky that it was a 'worked' item from pre-1946, as otherwise we wouldn't have been able to sell it without a special licence. Apparently, the market for antique taxidermy is thriving.

It is possible to build up a useful knowledge base for the department when you come across interesting cases like this. And while dealing with unhelpful utility companies is pretty much a weekly occurrence, securing a treasure chest or dealing with a 10ft tiger skin could have been a one-off. If not, I'll know what to do next time.

 

Sofia Tayton is a partner and head of care and capacity at Lodders Solicitors

She writes the regular in-practice article on care and capacity for Private Client Adviser