The Court committed the plaintiff's estate, insofar as it consisted of her rights and obligations in the proceedings, to the NSW Trustee under s 41 of the NSW Trustee and Guardian Act 2009, finding that the unrepresented 79-year-old plaintiff was incapable of managing her affairs in relation to the family provision proceedings. The Court emphasised that the s 41 inquiry is directed to functional management capacity in the context of the litigation — not to whether the person has dementia or lacks mental capacity generally — and applied the Slaveski criteria for assessing a self-represented litigant's capacity to conduct proceedings. The Court also confirmed, following Mao, that when acting on its own motion under s 41, the procedural requirements of UCPR rr 57.3 and 57.4 do not apply, though it dispensed with them for abundant caution.
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