Working to full capacity

Manchester will be at the forefront of vulnerable client work in the future, says Hugh Jones, as he considers the inexorable rise of Court of Protection work over the course of his legal career

I have been a private client solicitor all my working life. I have worked in central Manchester all my qualified life. Times have changed, the structure of law firms have changed and areas of work have changed too.

Professional solicitor

When I qualified in 1979, 'private client' work did not exist. You were either a contentious or non-contentious lawyer. It was still the age of the professional solicitor doing what came through the door. A large firm was one with ten or more partners.

The era of specialism was yet to come. One would have a degree of expertise. I did wills, probate and conveyancing. This was not an untypical mix in those days. I joined a five-partner firm called Howards. They had a floor in 123 Deansgate and branch offices in Hazel Grove, Tottington and Southport. One partner lived in Hazel Grove, another near Tottington, and another in Southport. You can see how the business plan had evolved.

I was one of two or three assistant solicitors. There was also a clerk doing conveyancing. This was a typical firm. On the floor below was Goldberg Blackburn and on the floor above, yet another small firm.

By 1981, we had merged with Goldberg Blackburn and my work started to evolve more towards wills, probate and trusts. I managed to drop the conveyancing. By 1983, I was a salaried partner running a new branch office in Sale.

Goldberg Blackburn also had a branch office in Wythenshawe - not because a partner lived there, but because it was a source of work for the busy criminal department. There was more than one partner who lived in Sale.

I became the ninth or tenth partner. Within ten years the firm had changed beyond all recognition.

In that period I was able to follow my own interests in the areas of incapacity. First, dealing with the local Mencap branch and developing a practice dealing with learning disability issues and then, ever so gradually, doing some Court of Protection work: it wasn't planned, it just happened.

A client had had a severe brain injury and it was suggested I act as his receiver. I did for a short time and then, after a period of recovery, he was able to manage his affairs and, following a trip to London to appear before Master McFarlane he was deemed capable of handling his affairs and I had the privilege of handing his money over to him.

Receivership was not an area of work we solicitors really got involved in. It was only in the 1990s that personal injury and clinical negligence litigation had developed to the point where some of us were suggesting that family receivers were not always a good idea. Irwin Mitchell in Sheffield were the pioneers in the North.

I started to develop my own Court of Protection work at Pannone's in the mid-1990s. Discussions with my personal injury and clinical negligence partners developed the appointment of professional deputies to protect the client and also to develop an interesting area of work. It was a win/win situation. The client had the cost of the receiver paid for and I was able to develop a work stream I enjoyed. Before this, the client recovered the court fees, but not the cost of a professional deputy. Even then the costs claimed were modest as there was no history of the work to build on.

Niche market

At that time few firms did this work. I was able to source new work from many small or medium-sized personal injury or clinical negligence firms. That persisted for a good few years. Some firms started to do the work themselves but until, say five or ten years ago, the market was still relatively small.

Over the last ten years or so I have seen a steady growth of firms in the North West wanting to do this work themselves. It is mainly firms dealing with personal injury and clinical negligence work seeing this as an income stream. However, the real issue is the client. The head injured are a special group and the role of deputy, since the coming into force of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 in October 2007, has evolved from that of receiver. Rather than control, the role is now one of support and empowerment.

At Pannone's I spent ten years or so building a specialist team dealing with a large volume of both internally and externally referred deputyships. In 2013, I set up my own firm specialising solely in Court of Protection work. Such a firm would have been unthinkable when I first set out in my professional life, but now it seems a logical and natural development.

From the early 1990s where Court of Protection as a specialism didn't exist, we now have a plethora of firms who have their own in-house Court of Protection department. Many deal with financial issues, some deal also with welfare issues.

A once-arcane area of law has now exploded into one that is constantly referred to in the papers and television, receives a lot of judicial attention and has become a serious political issue. The recent House of Lords Select Committee report has had a lot to say about how the process can improve. The government endorses that. There are changes afoot about billing and digitisation of services.

From a world where precious few lawyers knew much, if anything, about the Court of Protection, we have one where most lawyers have some knowledge and we have individuals choosing to qualify into this work and seek it out in training contracts.

Manchester is a key couture for this work, allied to its large number of personal injury and clinical negligence practices. However, the challenge of the next few years is to see what constraints will be improved by the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) and the Senior Court Costs Office in respect of billing for this vulnerable client group. Proportionality is the key word.

The future in this area of work means a return to the more traditional role of the solicitor in concentrating on this client group's needs in a cost-effective and understanding way.

The next 20 years are going to see as much, if not more, change as the last 20 years. It is both an exciting and rewarding are of work to be in and I recommend it to those who might be thinking of a change of professional direction.

It is not for everyone but it is a special area of work that needs dedicated specialists working in it. I see Manchester at the forefront of any change.

Hugh Jones is the managing director of Hugh Jones Solicitors www.hughjonessolicitors.co.uk

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