Services

Family Offices

From our offices in key financial centers around the world, our lawyers advise family offices, foundations, and high-net-worth individuals on the most important legal issues facing their personal investments. We assist both formal and informal family offices across the full spectrum of investment, transactional, regulatory, human capital, and compliance concerns. Our focus on personal attention—bolstered by elite legal talent, global resources, and exceptional professional support—mean that our family office clients only have to make one call.

Our Family Office initiative brings together talent and resources across our private equity, private client, investment management, tax and tax-exempt, sovereign wealth, executive compensation, and employment practices. Our lawyers serve as trusted advisers throughout the lifecycle of a family office—from creation, to day-to-day-functioning, to support through dissolution or succession—and often act as external general counsel. Recognized as a leading law firm for private wealth law and tax-exempt organizations, we are well suited to advise on pooled investment vehicles, estate transfers, trusts and estates, philanthropic giving and impact structuring, foundation matters, tax planning, and more.

HOW WE CAN HELP

Our experience helping family offices includes:

Advising on qualification under Investment Advisers Act Rule 202(a)(11)(G)-1 Advisers Act registration and regulation
Reviewing existing trust, estate, and tax plans for family members
Counseling on trust administration and fiduciary accounting service issues
Minimizing transfer tax by leveraging federal estate, gift, GST, or other tax exemptions and implementing programs that include intra-family loans and sales
Advising on philanthropic and family giving/impact vehicles through single or multi-entity structures including limited liability companies, private foundations, donor-advised funds, and social welfare organizations
Counseling on all aspects of tax compliance, nonprofit governance, major gifts, endowments, and naming opportunities
Coordinating with sovereign wealth funds, investment funds, and wealth and asset managers
Guiding family offices in their business planning, including capital structuring strategy with debt and equity
Advising on stand-alone investments, minority investments, investments in private equity, and hedge funds and acquisitions
Counseling on US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) concerns, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) family office relief qualification, and other regulatory issues under federal and state law and related reporting requirements
Assisting in the acquisition, disposition, leasing, and financing of real estate, including single-family residences and commercial properties
Counseling on human resources, executive and incentive compensation, and benefit issues within the family office and for other employees of the family
Advising on the protection of family office assets, confidential information, and workforce disruptions
Providing dispute resolutions services and, when necessary, litigating commercial and trust and estate matters