Margaret C. Jillingham

Margaret is the firm's Managing Partner and leads its corporate practice. The corporate work divides broadly in two. There is the constitutional life of private companies, covering incorporation, articles, shareholders' agreements, share issues and transfers, directors' duties and the mechanics of having a decision properly taken. And there are the transactions that change who owns them: share and asset purchases, minority investments, management buy-outs, the reorganisation of family shareholdings, and the admission and retiral of partners in professional firms.

A recurring theme of Margaret's advice is that the provisions clients find least interesting at the time of a transaction, being those dealing with deadlock, valuation and exit, are the ones most likely to be read closely several years later.

Private clients

Margaret also looks after the firm's private clients, who are for the most part individuals and families of substantial means whose business affairs the firm already knows. A founder who has sold a company, a family that has held one for three generations, and a landowner whose estate is held through a company all arrive at the same set of personal questions once the commercial work is done.

That practice covers succession and the drafting of wills, the creation and running of trusts, family investment companies and other holding structures, lifetime giving, the ownership of heritable property, and the co-ordination of tax advice with the client's accountants. We do not give tax advice ourselves and we say so at the outset.

Succession in Scotland is a distinct discipline, and it catches out clients who have planned on an English basis. A Scottish estate cannot be freely disposed of by will: 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.

Planning that ignores those rights tends to produce the argument it was designed to prevent.

Work across borders

A good deal of both practices is international. Clients hold assets in more than one country, beneficiaries live abroad, buyers of a Scottish business are foreign owned, and questions of residence and domicile bear on the planning. Margaret advises on the Scots law aspects of those matters, instructs lawyers qualified in the relevant country for the rest, and co-ordinates their advice so that the client receives a single answer rather than three.

Clients are generally seen at the outset by Margaret personally, and a matter that begins with a partner remains with that partner.