If you need someone else to manage your financial or health care decisions, you can execute a power of attorney document to authorize an agent to make these decisions for you. A power of attorney is a legal agreement that entitles the agent to act on someone else’s behalf, who is known as the principal. People typically enact these agreements to prepare for the possibility of being incapable of making decisions due to a physical or mental condition, or out of convenience, for example, because they do not have the time to perform certain routine financial transactions. Illinois recently revised its power of attorney laws to increase the possible scope of an agent’s authority because of the increased diversity of financial needs and the improvement of medical technology.