COURSE CATEGORY
Professional Skills
Elder abuse and coercive behaviour
Reviewed 10 November 2025.
Coercive control and undue influence are growing concerns in elder law, with vulnerable clients often facing pressure from family members, caregivers, or others in positions of trust. Lawyers are uniquely placed to identify and respond to these situations, ensuring their clients’ rights and autonomy are protected.
Understanding the legal and ethical dimensions of coercion is essential for preserving client independence and ensuring their decisions are truly their own. Developing these skills strengthens client trust and reinforces a lawyer’s role as a compassionate and ethical advocate in later-life legal matters.
In this course, Professor Sue Field will discuss:
- The most common definition of elder abuse
- Common types of elder abuse
- Examples of financial abuse
- Protecting oneself
- The prudent practitioner
- Case law
Completion of this course will earn you 1 CPD unit
TARGET AUDIENCE
Solicitors in general practice.
CPD POINTS
1
TYPE
Video based interactive module
Professor Sue Field
Sue Field is an Australian Legal Practitioner who has worked both in practice and academe in the area of Elder Law for close to twenty years. During this time Sue has researched, consulted, taught, published and presented widely in this emerging speciality.
Sue is currently a member of the following NSW Law Society’s Committees, Elder Law, Capacity and Succession and Rural Issues; a member of the ALRC Elder Abuse Advisory Committee, a Distinguished Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Elder Law, a Research Fellow at UWA and a Lead Investigator in the Cognitive Decline Partnership Centre.
Sue is co-editor of the recently released text on ‘Elder Law – A Guide for working with Older Australians’ Federation Press, 2018. Sue is also co-authoring a lay person’s guide to elder law due for publication early 2019.
