This session will examine the specific barriers to older citizens needing legal assistance to protect their rights and property.

Those barriers can be:

• structural (for example an inability to access services, service providers, courts and tribunals, and government departments by reason of technology which the older person either doesn't understand, or doesn't have available to them, or both);
• subjective (for example those lacking legal capacity who are not sui juris and who do not have in place the legal means by which another can act on their behalf – for example a Power of Attorney); and/or
• objective (for example where the need for access to justice stems from miscreance by those closest to the elderly person – carers, younger family members, accommodation providers etc).

The session will bring together those involved in meeting these justice challenges – legal practitioner, judges, geriatricians and others with a view to defining best practice when it comes to identifying the elder person's legal issue to be resolved, taking coherent instructions from them, collating the evidence, and prosecuting the elderly person's case before a court or tribunal. The session will also touch on the lawyer's ethical responsibilities in accepting retainers in this complex area of the law.