If someone applies for a personal order or property order for you, there may first be a “pre-hearing conference” with a judge, to identify the problem that the person applying for the order wants to deal with. The judge will see if you and that person can agree on how to deal with it without the court having to make any formal court orders.

If the pre-hearing conference doesn’t resolve the issue, the case will go to a full Family Court hearing.

Protection of Personal and Property Rights Act 1988, ss 74, 75

Usually, yes. You have to be at the hearing unless the judge believes that you’re completely unable to understand the case, or that being at the hearing may cause you serious mental, emotional or physical harm, or unless you’re disrupting the hearing so that it can’t carry on with you there.

Protection of Personal and Property Rights Act 1988, s 65

The Family Court will make sure you have a lawyer. If you don’t already have one of your own, the court will appoint a lawyer for you, who’ll be paid for by the government.

The court-appointed lawyer will contact you and help you understand the application that’s been made to the court and what the person who’s applying is asking for. The lawyer has to find out what you think about the application and how you want to respond to it, and they have to give effect to what you want. The lawyer will look at why the order was applied for and the solutions proposed by other parties.

The lawyer will make recommendations to the court that are the least restrictive possible and encourage the person to develop capacity.