Private Wealth Services
Protecting, managing and growing your wealth
Freeths’ private wealth services
Our Private Wealth Team specialises in advising wealthy individuals and their families, entrepreneurs, landowners, and trustees. We work alongside our clients’ wealth managers, tax advisers, accountants, corporate finance advisers and land agents to provide a joined-up service of the highest quality.
Our clients have complex needs and busy lives, so we work closely with them to gain an in-depth understanding of their objectives and we work tirelessly to support them in achieving those goals.
Why choose our private wealth expertise?
As trusted advisers we build lasting relationships with our clients, always with a view to the future challenges and opportunities facing them and their families. Offering a tailored approach to suit your needs, we will work to the finest detail to ensure that our knowledge and expertise combines to help you manage, protect and grow your private wealth.
Whatever our clients’ need, our team can provide the skills, creative thinking, specialist advice and detail-driven service to ensure you get your desired outcomes. We are also a member of an international network of law firms and accountants so can provide access to expert advice wherever you and your assets are located.
Specialist private wealth lawyers
Our Private Wealth team is made up of senior lawyers drawn from specialist departments across the firm, including personal and corporate tax, trusts and estate planning, corporate finance, family, reputation management and immigration services. We have advised our high net worth clients on a range of complex, multi-stakeholder issues including:
- Inheritance tax planning
- Family investment companies
- Family and divorce matters
- Pre and post nuptial agreements
- Contentious estates
- Cross-border tax and estate planning
- Trusts
- Property holding structures (LLPs and partnerships)
- Farming partnerships
- Life policy cross-options for shareholders
- Real estate
- Asset protection
- Wills
- Business exit planning
- Immigration
- Reputation protection
Key contact
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Our accreditations
We are celebrating another year of accreditations and rankings.
Case study
Working closely with the CEO of a major property developer in London, we offered multi-faceted support to him and his family.
The client has significant wealth, some of which is tied up in long-term property development projects held in complex corporate structures. He is an existing client of our Trusts and Estates team but needed corporate advice in order to deal with his business interests and achieve his succession planning goals. Having decided to engage advisers to carry out strategic estate planning, the client took the decision to introduce his interest in a large-scale property development partnership into a family investment company. The challenge in this case was to understand how the partnership interest could be assigned to the family investment company (FIC) under its existing constitutional rules.
Working alongside the tax team of one of the big four accountancy firms, and the business’ in-house legal team, we devised a mechanism to allow the partnership interest to be transferred to the family investment company tax efficiently. The outcome was a family investment company which held the client’s valuable partnership interest with future increase in value accruing to his minor children, but control being retained by our client and his wife.
Each client has different priorities and concerns when passing wealth to the next generation. We listened to our client and designed a structure that allowed him and his wife to retain control, and protect against future events. Whist our corporate experts drafted the company’s constitution, they worked alongside our family and private client specialists to ensure that all angles were covered. In anticipation of the complexity of the client’s business arrangements, we produced a guide for his executors (one of which is the firm’s trust company) to enable them to manage the family investment company and its assets in the event of the client’s death.
We engage regularly with our client and have helped him build the family’s wealth as the family investment company has acquired more assets. We supported the family’s business requirements, while balancing and keeping the needs of our individual high net worth clients front of mind.
Our clients’ needs remain at the heart of everything we do – we’re here to deliver and get the best results for you.
- Advising a family with complex historic trusts on the division of cash and land assets via a company demerger, thus ending a longstanding dispute. Working alongside the family’s incumbent wealth manager and accountant, and leading a Freeths team comprising corporate and personal tax specialists, property lawyers and corporate lawyers.
- Advising on the long-term strategy for passing ownership and control of a commercial property business between second and third-generation family members by means of a family charter and revised corporate governance documents.
- Structuring a Jersey-registered FIC alongside our client’s accountant, Jersey lawyers and investment managers enabling him to move £20m+ investment portfolio into the FIC and to benefit his minor children.
- Documenting numerous partnership arrangements for landed estates and farming families alongside specialist tax advisers, Freeths Trusts, Estates and Tax team and the Agricultural Property team.
- Acting as legal advisor to a £50m+ trust, including advice in relation to trustees’ duties regarding trust expenses and trustees’ charging.
- Assisting with legal advice to a nationally recognised landed estate (£100m+) comprising complex family trusts with multiple asset classes.
- Advising an Isle of Man-based billionaire regarding their UK estate structuring, including the use of a private trust company.
- Acting on behalf of a private client with substantial land, business and investment property holdings. With multiple children in dispute during the client’s lifetime, a statutory will application was successfully made for the removal of the children as executors, despite being entitled to the residue. Appointed independent executor of the estate, enabling its effective management when the client died. The children remained in dispute and, despite numerous unsuccessful attempts at disruption, the administration was effectively concluded.
- Advising family office and entrepreneurial investment business, Growth Partner LLP, on various matters including investment opportunities, property portfolio matters, joint ventures, and personal matters.
Meet the team
Sarah Foster
Oxford Office Managing Partner & Joint Head of Private Client Services
Mark Keeley
Partner & Joint Head of Private Client Services
Louise Lewis
Partner & Joint Head of Oxford Trusts, Estates and Tax Team
Contact us today
Whatever your legal needs, our wide ranging expertise is here to support you and your business, so let’s start your legal journey today and get you in touch with the right lawyer to get you started.
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