Individuals and families with accumulated wealth often decide to form a private organization—known as a “family office”—to manage investments, trusts, and financial and legal services. Family offices take many forms and may include a single family or multiple families.
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These entities frequently hire executives to manage a broad array of investments and services, from legal, accounting, and financial services to issues surrounding general lifestyle, travel, and personal assistance for family members. Whatever the form, a family office faces unique, challenging issues. These often include handling personal matters for family members, income tax and estate planning strategies, liability protection, entity creation, state and federal securities, and accounting compliance issues, among others.
Perkins Coie has a long history of representing family offices and quasi-family office arrangements. Our team of attorneys has a wealth of experience assisting individuals and families who wish to establish and administer family offices or other similar structures.
We regularly help clients analyze succession issues and solve complicated legal challenges that enable families to achieve the goals of their family office. We collaborate with family members and family office advisors who need support in a variety of different disciplines, including:
- Estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer tax planning
- Income tax planning
- State and local tax planning
- Trust management, review, and advisory services
- Dispute resolution services, including experienced litigation support
- Tax-exempt organization creation and ongoing management
- Entity and asset pooling for investment purposes
- State and federal securities regulatory compliance for family offices
- International family office administration
- Private trust company formation and advice
- Fiduciary accounting and systems issues
- Family privacy and intellectual property protection
- Entity creation and ongoing management services
- Liability analysis and protection
- Business succession services
Our Family Office Services practice is distinguished by our attorneys’ deep and broad experience in creating, structuring, modifying, and administering trusts, estates, and family offices. Our professionals apply both creativity and ingenuity to the multifaceted issues pertaining to trusts and estates and federal and state tax planning and administration. The hallmark of our work is the successful mediation, settlement, and disposition of legal proceedings favorable to our clients.
The firm’s fiduciary controversy and litigation team represents trustees, beneficiaries, executors, boards of directors, financial institutions, entities, and corporate officers in pursuing and defending fiduciary litigation. Drawing on the firm’s significant resources, our attorneys develop and apply pragmatic and creative solutions that can help deliver innovative, timely, client-favorable resolutions to a dispute. Typical areas of counsel include:
- Advising boards of directors, including special independent committees
- Affiliated investment claims
- Breach of fiduciary duty claims
- Corporate fiduciary duty claims
- Federal and state tax disputes (income, estate, and gift taxes)
- Personal and employee benefit trusts
- Probate and estate litigation
- Shareholder disputes
- Significant and complex investment claims (e.g., securities lending, litigation, strategic shareholder purchase and sale)
Fiduciary Controversy and Litigation Team
 Eric BrandfonbrenerPartner |
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