We bought LPAs from three other UK providers. Here's what happened.

If you're going to claim you're the fastest LPA provider in the UK, you'd better know what the others are actually like. So in March, we bought LPAs from three other UK providers. Different email address each, paid with our own card, and we made notes the whole way through.

Here's what we found.

Provider A: polished website, slow middle

Provider A is a well-known online service — you've probably seen the ads. The website is clean and the sign-up process is slick. A short onboarding quiz identifies which Lasting Power of Attorney you need and routes you into the right flow. It takes about three minutes. It's well-built.

After the quiz, you create an account and land on a long online form. This is where things slowed down.

The form was functional but had several sections where the question wasn't quite clear. The replacement attorney section had a tooltip that introduced more confusion than it resolved. We're familiar with LPA structure. We still had to read that tooltip twice and then decide to ignore it. A first-time customer filling in this form alone would hit that section and stall.

We completed the form in about forty minutes and submitted. An automated confirmation email arrived immediately. Then nothing.

Fourteen days later, draft documents appeared in our inbox. No communication in the interval. On day ten, one of us sent a chase email. The reply came two days later: documents would arrive "within the next few days."

The drafts, when they came, were accurate. Correctly drafted, nothing wrong with them as legal documents. But we'd included a small deliberate inconsistency in the form to see whether anyone would catch it. It appeared in the draft unchanged. A careful reader might spot it. Most people wouldn't.

Fourteen days for drafting, no proactive updates, one undetected error. For someone who isn't in a hurry and is happy to check their own work closely, Provider A would produce a valid document. For someone working against a time constraint, the lack of any urgency mechanism is a real problem.

Provider B: great people, slow process

Provider B leads with a phone call rather than an online form. Their website has a prominent booking button. You fill in a short form — name, contact details, a rough description of what you need — and someone calls you back.

We submitted the form on a Monday morning. The call came Wednesday afternoon. Two days is not slow by industry standards. It's not same-day either.

The planner we spoke to was good. Clearly qualified, patient, thorough on the Certificate Provider section — which is the part of the process where most customers need the most help. The call ran just over an hour. That's an appropriate length for this kind of conversation.

She said draft documents would be ready within a week. They took eight working days — ten calendar days.

The planner was exactly the kind of person you'd want helping with your LPA. But the process around her was slow.

The documents were well-drafted. Clear, correct, complete. And the planner was genuinely good at her job — warm, knowledgeable, the kind of person you'd trust with a difficult conversation about capacity or attorneys.

But when we asked to change one detail in the draft — a replacement attorney — the answer was to call back and speak to someone. That correction took three more days.

The pattern with Provider B is a gap between the quality of the people and the speed of the system around them. The planners are capable. The process is slow by design, running on a full diary and a queue for changes.

One offhand comment stood out. Part-way through the call, our planner mentioned she had "quite a full diary that week." A small thing to say, but a telling one. It signals that urgency isn't built into the model — customers fit around availability, not the other way round.

Provider C: lowest price, most friction

Provider C is positioned as a budget option. The price was noticeably lower than the others. The website was sparse. No obvious phone option. Everything done by online form and email.

The form was longer than Provider A's, and some of the phrasing assumed background knowledge the customer might not have. The Certificate Provider section referred to "Part B of the LPA" without explaining what Part B was or why it mattered. That section would confuse most people who haven't done an LPA before.

We submitted on a Thursday. Draft documents arrived sixteen days later.

They contained an error. Not the deliberate inconsistency we'd planted — a separate error, a transcription mistake in the attorneys section. One attorney's surname had been spelled differently in the document from how we'd entered it on the form.

We reported this by email. The corrected documents arrived two days later. Fair enough — two days for a correction is reasonable. But the mistake shouldn't have been there. The process from form to draft apparently doesn't include a proofread before the document goes out.

Total time, start to finish: just under three weeks. No proactive updates at any point. An error in the first draft. A correction that required chasing.

What we built differently

We want to be straightforward about this: all three providers produced valid Lasting Power of Attorney documents. None of them did anything that was legally wrong. They're running legitimate services and their documents would stand up.

But all three shared the same assumption: that the customer has time.

Two weeks for one, ten days for another, three weeks for the third. No mechanism for an urgent case to be handled differently from a routine one. No proactive communication. No same-day option.

When we built our service, we started with the customer who can't wait. The family with a diagnosis. The person going into hospital. The woman who watched her friend's family spend 72 hours not knowing what they were allowed to do.

We don't run a queue in the way these providers do. One of our planners picks up a case and works it through. No batching, no handoffs, no waiting for a busy diary to clear. Documents are proofread before they leave us — that's not optional. We handle the Certificate Provider question on the first call, not as a late discovery.

We also keep customers informed. You don't have to chase us on day ten to find out your documents are still in progress.

The error rate at Provider C suggests that speed and quality don't always travel together in this industry. We think they have to. An LPA with a mistake in the attorneys section doesn't just delay things — it can invalidate the document entirely, or at minimum require a correction cycle that adds weeks.

Speed that produces errors isn't useful. Speed with qualified hands, proper checks, and honest communication is a different thing altogether. That's what we built toward.