September marked the beginning of a new term for the Ontario Bar Association. With the new term comes a new series of Brown Bag Lunch meetings for the Trusts and Estates section.
This month’s meeting kicked off with an interesting issue that some estate planning lawyers have been dealing with in relation to powers of attorney. Some attendees shared that they have recently been receiving correspondence from financial institutions asking them to confirm a power of attorney that has been presented to the bank. If the question arose as a concern about fraud, some BBLers would be comfortable confirming that they did indeed have a file for that person and had attended to the execution of the power of attorney. However, in some cases the banks appeared to be asking the lawyer to opine on the validity of the power of attorney. It seemed to attendees that in making these requests the banks may be attempting to offload some of their liability, and most BBL’ers present were not comfortable providing any kind of opinion or assurances relating to the validity of the power of attorney.
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