Private Client & Succession
Succession, trusts and the structuring of personal wealth for individuals and families of substantial means, generally those whose companies the firm already advises.
Most of our private clients arrive through a company. A founder sells a business and has to decide what happens to the proceeds. A family has held a company for three generations and the third is not the same shape as the first. A landowner's estate sits inside a corporate structure that was designed for a different purpose. The commercial work finishes and the personal questions begin.
We act for a small number of individuals and families on those questions. We do not give tax advice, and we work alongside the client's accountants where tax is in issue.
Succession is different in Scotland
This is where planning drawn on an English model most often fails. A Scottish estate cannot be disposed of entirely as the will directs. A surviving spouse or civil partner, and the children, have legal rights in the deceased's moveable estate which take effect whatever the will says, and those rights cannot be defeated simply by leaving the moveable estate elsewhere.
An English will, or an English-trained adviser's plan, will frequently assume a testamentary freedom that does not exist here. The remedy is rarely complicated, but it has to be identified, and it is usually identified either at the outset or after a death, when it is a good deal more expensive.
Trusts and structures
We advise on the creation and running of trusts, on the duties of trustees, and on the structures families use to hold a business or an investment portfolio across generations, including family investment companies. The question we ask first is what the structure is actually for, because a structure built for a tax outcome and not for a family tends to fail on contact with the family.
Wealth that crosses borders
A good proportion of this work has an element outside Scotland. Clients hold property in more than one country, beneficiaries live abroad, a family business has operations in Europe, or questions of residence and domicile bear on the planning. Estates spanning more than one legal system raise questions about which country's law governs succession to which asset, and the answer is frequently not the one the client assumed.
We advise on the Scots law position, instruct lawyers qualified in the relevant country for the rest, and co-ordinate the advice so that the client receives a single plan rather than several that do not fit together. Members of the firm are qualified in England and Wales and in an EU member state, which shortens that process considerably.
Discretion
Private client work is conducted on the same terms as everything else the firm does, and the identity of a private client is not something we discuss.