Do You Need an Attorney to Create a Power of Attorney?

You may think it’s ok to create your own Power of Attorney online using a “fill in the blank” form.

Hi. I’m Gary the owner of DeWitt Law.

Power of Attorney documents are not “one size fits all”.

A cookie-cutter form may not cover specific situations in your life. Rules vary from state to state. Certain very specific language may be required to grant proper authority in certain transactions.

There’s more to creating a legal document than just filling in blanks.

For instance, to be legally binding, the principal – or person signing the Power of Attorney – must have sufficient mental capacity when the document is signed. This means that they must fully understand the nature and effect of the document. An attorney who creates a document for a client will ensure that he or she is competent to sign.

If you print a form from the internet and problems are discovered later, it’s usually too late to do anything about it.

Take the story of John and his wife, who retired to Arkansas from the Northeast. They printed Power of Attorney forms from the internet, typed them up, and had them notarized.

Later, when the wife became incapacitated due to dementia, John learned that his wife’s pension plan administrator and banks would not honor the document because they had misspelled her name on the form.

Something so simple, but so serious, rendered the documents useless. John had to open a Guardianship for his wife to manage her affairs, both financial and health care. John had to ask the Court’s permission to make every decision on behalf of his wife.

Start your plan at dewitt.law.