Family Office and High Net Worth

Dentons Family Office Direct Investment Survey Report 2023 provides an overview of key approaches family offices are adopting to align their goals with a range of investment opportunities—determining those to embrace and others to avoid. The survey report derives from the input of nearly 200 family office principals and executives from 32 countries who provided insight into the key factors driving investment strategies. 

The first of its kind, curated by a legal industry innovator, this report offers thought-provoking insight, supported by data-driven graphs and charts, into the factors family offices consider as they weigh investment options. 

Human mobility has increased significantly in recent decades. Globalization, the relaxation of exchange controls and visa restrictions in certain regions, the pursuit of political and economic safe havens, geopolitical risk, war, social unrest, climate change, and investment diversity are key factors.

Countries compete on the global market to attract this talent and financial capital through economic residency and citizenship programs.

People with liquid funds available for investment can acquire residency and/or citizenship rights in another country in addition to their usual country of residence/citizenship. Countries with such programs gain access to talent with desired skills and a significant financial investment in their domestic economies in exchange for offering these rights. It is a simple, legitimate, and mutually beneficial exchange.

Talented, high-net-worth individuals - motivated by such factors as safety, economic opportunity, quality of life, and global mobility - are increasingly drawn to pursue alternative or secondary residency and citizenship.

This guide discusses some of the important features and considerations.

The greatest wealth transfer in history is underway.  In America alone, Baby Boomers will pass an estimated US$35 trillion of wealth to younger generations over the next 20 years. Privately held family businesses are at the center of this transition. The transfer of wealth from such businesses can be planned and orderly, or forced by external circumstances—and thus much harder to manage.

In this whitepaper, the Dentons Family Office team examines the myriad complexities of transferring wealth in a family business setting and shares insights for anyone planning or anticipating such a transition.  If you are contemplating a sale of your privately-owned company, consider Dentons Exit+, a one-stop-shop service offering bringing together leading lawyers, M&A advisors, accountants and wealth management professionals to help you develop a successful strategy.

Choosing the right trust jurisdiction can be crucial for securing your wealth or could lead to unintentionally putting it at risk. But how do you make the best choice?

In this whitepaper, the Dentons Family Office team highlights essential factors to consider.

The private and business affairs of wealthy families can be complex and involve multiple jurisdictions, tax regimes and asset classes. In this whitepaper, the Dentons Family Office team examines important considerations for cross-border wealth structuring strategies, including structural product solutions, jurisdictional selection, and regulatory safeguards from abuse, in order to provide strategic advice for wealth owners.

As family offices look for ways to improve their structures and revisit their legal strategies, we offer the following set of questions to help you engage with your legal team. Please note that this is not a comprehensive list, but merely a starting point to help navigate each family office in the right direction. The complexity of each situation may dictate that additional queries be contemplated. Knowing which questions to ask and when to ask them is critical to the success of each family office. There are no easy answers in the family office realm. However, the below dynamic sample questions are imperative for each family office to consider.

If you are looking to sell your privately-owned company, you need to prepare and complete a number of critical steps. As you plot out your strategy, it is beneficial to have an experienced team by your side to help you avoid potential pitfalls, while also extracting the maximum value from the business you have worked so hard to build. Dentons’ Exit+ brings together leading lawyers, M&A advisors, accountants, and wealth management professionals to help you develop and implement an effective strategy for selling your business and preparing for life after exit. 

Selling a business can be one of the most transformative moments in the life of an individual or family. The transaction can set the framework for legacy-building and bringing levels of financial security to current and future generations—or it can be part of a strategy for managing a challenging situation that needed to be done sooner rather than later. In this whitepaper, we explore the 14 critical action points to consider when selling your business.

While each family office is designed or leveraged around the needs of its principals, best practices do exist and can be “fitted” to unique circumstances. In this whitepaper, we explore how to potentially define the term “family office,” while proposing a nomenclature and common characteristics of the most typical family office models. We hope this article provides a framework to support the study, development, and testing of real world best practices for family offices.

Businesspeople speak in terms of risks and rewards, not warranties and indemnities. This explains why family office professionals, when reviewing investment and shareholders’ agreements, often feel like they are reading hieroglyphics. Thus, the need arises for a legal version of the Rosetta stone, the slate that showed hieroglyphics side-by-side with Greek, helping scholars decode the distinct characters comprising Egypt’s formal writing system. In this insight piece, we offer the lawyer’s equivalent of the Rosetta Stone for cross-border venture and growth capital transactions – a “Risketta Stone” – to help you understand the legal jargon surrounding common investor protections and the risks they are intended to address.

The risk and threat landscape for family offices continues to evolve and present new challenges. COVID-19 created new risk issues for families to consider and manage, but the pandemic is only one dimension of the increasingly complex threat environment that family offices face.  The changing and growing ways that family office risk and threat management systems can be breached has made the task increasingly more difficult. Executives continue to struggle to find effective responses to these multi-faceted threats (physical, financial, health, cyber, and privacy-related).

Is your family office risk-ready or merely risk-aware? What defines the term “risk” as perceived by a family office versus someone on the outside? How has the pandemic affected your risk-readiness score? Find out answers to these queries and more in the Dentons risk-readiness resource for family offices

• High net worth family Advising on the succession and estate planning matters and the setting up of a complex trust structure which involves a private trust company, family office and several additional customized measures in the constitution, trust deeds and letters of wishes which would be to achieve the client’s succession goals for the next few generations in Asia.
• Prominent North American family office investing in Europe: Advised global billionaire family office based in the US on its purchase of sports teams in European countries, including related trust issues, as the purchase related to their personal affairs and succession plans for the family office.
• Well-known US family: A prominent US family has engaged the Firm to support their family office. Our Family Office team currently advises on matters of structuring, employment and cybersecurity, among others. A longstanding client of the firm, we have guided the family through challenging aspects of wealth preservation and generational transition over the past several years.

Represented this US based family office of an ultra-high net worth individual in the acquisition, due diligence and closing, including the hotel management agreement, of the CuisinArt and Reef Resorts and Golf Course in Anguilla. The complex multi-use project includes two hotels, two championship golf courses and various residential products to be developed and sold. The property is being renovated in phases, with plans to increase the number of hotel rooms, expanding a hydroponic farm and installing a new solar array. The second phase will include a spa and wellness center, and improvements to the golf course. Our representation included comprehensive negotiations with the Premier and ministers of the country in negotiating what is effectively a 250 year ground lease as to the renovation, property uses, rent and tax benefits, as the Crown owns part of the resort’s property.