An adult son makes the appointment for his mother, a transfer of equity on a house worth, say, £280,000. He sits beside her, answers most of the questions put to her and corrects her twice on dates. The attendance note records the instructions and the tax advice, and says nothing about who else was in the room, what the client said in her own words, or whether anyone checked she had followed it.
Capacity is presumed, and the presumption does not weaken because a client is old, unwell or hard to follow. It is specific to the decision and to the moment. The question is never whether she is generally capable of managing her affairs. It is whether she can make this decision today. A client who chooses what you would not choose, or who disposes of property in a way her family finds unreasonable, has made an unwise decision and not an incapable one. The Mental Capacity Act 2005 sets out that framework, and a firm treating eccentricity as incapacity fails its client as surely as one missing a genuine problem.
Vulnerability is wider than capacity
Most vulnerable clients have capacity. Bereavement, serious illness, a recent diagnosis, English as a second language, difficulty reading, money worries and pressure from someone at home all change how a client takes in what you tell them, and not one of them stops that client instructing you. What changes is how you communicate, not whether you act. Advice a client cannot take in at one sitting can be given across two appointments.
Seeing the client alone at least once, and recording that you did, does more work than any other single step. Where a relative makes the appointment, attends it, answers for the client or stands to gain from the transaction, a private conversation stops being a courtesy and becomes the evidence that the instructions were the client's own.
What survives is the note written at the time. Record who was present and when anyone left, what you asked, what the client said in her own words, how you satisfied yourself she understood what she was doing, and what you did about any doubt. A note recording the outcome and not the enquiry proves nothing when the transfer is challenged years later by a sibling who was never there. Where real doubt exists on a will or a substantial gift, long standing professional practice is to obtain a medical opinion at the time rather than reconstruct the position afterwards.
Adjustments for a disabled client are an obligation on the firm under the Equality Act 2010, not a favour. A longer appointment, a client care letter in plain language, a home or hospital visit, an interpreter the firm instructs itself rather than one supplied by the family, and correspondence in a format the client can read are ordinary professional practice.
Noticed once and never again
The failure is rarely at the first meeting. A fee earner notices something, deals with it well, and writes it into an attendance note that never reaches the matter record. The next letter out is the standard form, the file passes to a colleague covering holiday who knows nothing about it, and correspondence keeps going to the son's address because that is where the first letter went.
Correcting that costs a firm nothing. Put the vulnerability and the adjustment on the matter record where every fee earner opening the file sees them, rather than in one attendance note. Review the entry as the matter runs, because a client's position changes. Check that the correspondence address belongs to the client.
The Bracton AI Assistant connects to the case management or CRM system your firm already runs, LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another, and reads every live matter overnight. It flags the matters where a vulnerability was noted at the outset and nothing since refers to it, where correspondence on a client's matter goes to a third party address, and where a client recorded as needing an adjustment has been sent the standard form letter. On another vendor's system it sees what that interface exposes, normally matters, documents, correspondence, key dates and time records, while inside Bracton, the case and client management platform, nothing sits in the way. The software reads records and raises questions. It does not assess capacity, and the judgement stays with the solicitor who met the client. Every output goes in front of a qualified fee earner for sign off, and nothing is written back without that approval.
The pattern is worth measuring on your own files rather than on an example. The first written exercise a firm runs on its own records starts on the client account, reading client ledgers, the cash book and bank statements against the SRA Accounts Rules. If that is where you want to start, book a client account review.