Private Wealth Disputes

Private Wealth disputes can harm a family as well as their businesses for generations. Resolving these disputes requires long-term thinking, strategic insight and an understanding of the wider emotions and pressures that a family might experience.

We advise on the most sensitive, complex and high-value disputes involving wealth, succession and governance. This includes contested wills and incapacity claims, trust litigation across multiple jurisdictions, contests for control of a family-owned business, investigations and sanctions advice and tax Tribunals. 

Our clients are high-profile and high-net-worth individuals and families, as well as the family offices and private wealth advisers who support them. This includes trustees and fiduciaries (both individual and corporate), alongside executors, administrators and beneficiaries. We regularly work with offshore and onshore trust companies, as well as professional advisers and institutions involved in the management and governance of private wealth. 

We focus on our clients’ objectives, delivering practical outcomes whether through quiet behind-the-scenes coordination, alternative resolution, or litigation (and securing privacy and confidentiality where possible). We also help clients “stress-test” their existing structures so they can anticipate future disputes – and mitigate them – before they arise. 

Our experience covers:

• Trust disputes.
• Will and estate disputes.
• Mental capacity and fiduciary authority.
• Tax disputes and investigations.
• Family business and governance disputes.
• Cross-border disputes and enforcement.
• Financial crime and regulatory issues.
• Stress-testing international structures.

Work highlights include:

• acting for the successful party in the X Trusts litigation in the Bermuda Supreme Court and Court of Appeal, the most significant case on the role of trust protectors;
• advising the professional trustees of a number of offshore trusts in the context of a family-owned international business held in the trust structure in which family relations have broken down, on trust law, corporate, commercial litigation and tax issues as well as day-to-day administration. As part of this matter, we are also advising on HMRC investigations into various entities within the trust structure;
• advising the executor of a large UK estate in relation to claims of undue influence and testamentary incapacity;
• representing a private client in Court of Protection proceedings concerning the disputed control of a family business;
• securing the removal of an attorney and freezing of assets in a cross-border elder abuse case;
• assisting a family office with succession litigation linked to a large family business in the Far East;
• advising a Gulf family on an appropriate structure to protect assets from claims by offshore family members, including an assessment of the protection offered by offshore “firewall” legislation designed to protect trusts from attacks arising out of family and succession issue;
• advising a prominent member of a global family on a successful high-profile tax residence dispute which related to the application of a double tax treaty and the client’s “centre of vital interests”;
• advising a US family office on a post-M&A dispute, concerning various breaches of the agreement during the sale and a series of settlement agreements which were also subsequently breached. Also advising on the availability of worldwide freezing orders and asset disclosure, and the international enforcement of court judgments against assets held globally; and
• advising an individual subject to a high-profile INTERPOL Red Notice before the INTERPOL CCF in Lyon.