1)First, do no harm – there are many we cannot help, but none we cannot avoid harming. This principle is as important to the practice of law as it is to the practice of medicine.1‘The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts; but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?,’ Thackeray, The Newcomes, Book 1 chapter 20. There is a great deal to be said for ‘legal homeopathy’: the application of minute, sub-clinical, doses of law. That is tongue-in-cheek, but the lightest touch is often the best.

2)Give due weight to the importance for the person concerned of their liberty and wish to determine their own course in life.

3)In order to avoid disappointment later, be realistic about the proper function of the law and its limits. One can legislate for marriage but not for a happy marriage. The law provides a useful framework for managing conflict, conferring authority, enforcing legal duties and restraining the unlawful exercise of power. It cannot solve family conflict and underlying resentment, that feeling of not being a loved or favoured child, a scarcity of resources, the disease process itself or the fact that the person concerned must soon die.

4)Accept that risk cannot be avoided. All personal welfare decisions involve balancing competing risks of which the risk to the person’s physical safety is but one. Where appropriate, in order to avoid practising too defensively consider applying (or applying in the alternative) for a declaration that it is lawful and in the person’s best interests to take the conventional safeguarding risk rather than to avoid it (by, for example, separating them from their life-partner and removing them to a care home). Let the judge take the strain; that is why they are there.

5)Consider the adequacy of your evidence.