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The costs of care for people with a disability can be eye-watering and, in many cases, the state may be unwilling to provide a care regime which meets the full needs of the disabled person. In such cases, legal action may produce a more acceptable result. In one striking case concerning a man who was left paralysed after falling off a roof, a local authority had simply refused to pay the £468,000-a-year cost of providing a home-based care regime. The man, in his 30s, was immobile from the chest down...

In order to make a valid will, you need to know your own mind – and it helps to have a solicitor on hand to advise you. That was certainly so in a case in which a businessman left the lion's share of his £1 million fortune to a friend and colleague a few weeks before he died from alcoholism. Against medical advice, the man had discharged himself from hospital ten days before he signed his last will. He left his shareholding in his company – by far his largest...

Every property seller should be aware that, once contracts are exchanged, there is a strict obligation to complete the deal. One woman who failed to do that, following the death of her husband, was ordered by the High Court to go through with the sale and to pay substantial damages to buyers who were kept waiting for almost two years. The woman and her husband had contracted to sell their home for £500,000 and the buyers had paid a £50,000 deposit. However, she failed to complete the transaction following her...

Two recent surveys have underlined the importance to younger people of getting away from what is increasingly seen as a 'rent trap', in which the high cost of rentals prevents them from saving a sufficiently large deposit to be able to buy a home. The first revealed a substantial increase in the use of the 'right-to-buy' scheme for purchasers of first homes. Purchases of homes under the scheme from local authorities rose by more than 20 per cent (to 3,350) for the three months to the end of June 2016...