We have advisers in four jurisdictions and no single person who can tell us what is outstanding.
The coordinating function: one register of entities, holdings, obligations and dates across the whole structure, and one accountable point of contact who chases the advisers. Most family offices are not short of advice. They are short of anybody whose job it is to know what is outstanding across all of it at once, which is why the question that starts the conversation is almost never a legal question. It is a question about what is happening, where, and who is dealing with it.
Dinmore Bell provides the legal and commercial operating function for a family office: one register of entities, holdings, obligations and dates, contracts across the operating businesses and investments, employment and household arrangements, governance, and coordination of the office’s external advisers against one agreed scope.
How we own it
One register
Entities, directorships, filings, facility covenants, insurance and contractual obligations across every jurisdiction, in one place. The register is not a list of documents. It records the obligation, the date it bites, the entity it belongs to and the person accountable for it, which is what turns a filing cabinet into something a principal can be shown in ten minutes. Most offices discover on building it that they hold two dormant companies nobody could account for, a guarantee given by the wrong entity, and a facility covenant tested quarterly that nobody has tested.
Adviser coordination
Scopes agreed, fees benchmarked, deadlines held, and duplicated work stopped. Most offices are paying twice somewhere. It happens because each adviser was appointed to solve a specific problem and none was appointed to see the whole picture, so the tax team and the corporate team each build their own view of the structure and each bill for doing it. We agree one scope per adviser, hold the instruction, and make sure the answer from one is given to the others rather than rediscovered.
Discretion by default
Anonymised matter handling, controlled information flow, and nothing named in anything we publish. Information is segmented by need rather than by seniority, which means the people working on a transaction see the transaction and not the rest of the structure. Where a matter requires external advisers, they are instructed on what they need and no more.
The entities, and what they are still for
Structures accumulate. A company set up for a property that has since been sold, a holding vehicle from a transaction that never completed, a partnership retained because unwinding it looked expensive at the time. Each carries filing obligations, director duties and a cost. We work through the structure entity by entity, record what each one now does, and put a recommendation against the ones that do nothing, so the decision to keep or collapse is taken deliberately rather than by default each year.
The operating businesses
Where a family office sits above trading companies, the contract estate of those businesses is usually the largest single source of unmanaged risk in the structure. Supplier terms nobody has read since signing, customer contracts with liability positions the board has never seen, leases with breaks and reviews approaching, and licences tied to individuals rather than entities. We hold that estate the same way we hold the office’s own: abstracted, dated, and monitored, with the commercial position taken in the window rather than after it.
Employment, household and reputation
A family office employs people in an unusual configuration: office staff, household staff, sometimes crew and estate teams, often across more than one country. The paperwork is frequently the weakest part of the whole structure, because it was drafted for a single employee years ago and copied since. Contracts, confidentiality, right to work, payroll jurisdiction and the exit arrangements that matter most all need to be correct before they are tested, because the one dispute a family office cannot afford is the one that becomes public.
Governance the next generation can use
The documents that decide what happens on a succession are almost never the ones people expect. Articles, shareholders’ agreements, trust deeds and family constitutions have to agree with each other, and in most structures at least one of them was drafted in isolation. We read them together, identify where they conflict, and set out in plain terms who decides what, on what majority, and what happens when a family member wants out. Investment, tax and regulated trust advice come from the office’s own regulated advisers; the coordination and the commercial position sit with us.
What the first ninety days look like
We start with the register, because nothing sensible can be decided without it. Entities, holdings, contracts, obligations, dates and advisers, assembled from what exists rather than from a questionnaire. By the end of it there is a single document showing the structure as it actually is, a list of what is outstanding, and a short list of things that need deciding rather than merely recording. That document is usually the first time anyone has seen the whole position on one page.
Where specialists come in
Investment, tax and regulated trust advice are provided by the office's regulated advisers. We coordinate and hold them to scope; we do not advise on any of it.
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Where nine per cent of your revenue goes
Contract value rarely leaks in a single expensive event. It leaks quietly, through renewal dates nobody owns.
- What does an outsourced legal function do for a family office that our lawyers do not?
- Law firms answer questions when asked. The gap in most family offices is that nobody owns the question of what is outstanding across the whole structure. We hold the register, the dates and the adviser scopes, and we instruct the firms when specialist work is needed.
- Do you replace our existing advisers?
- No. We coordinate them. Tax computation, audit, regulated trust advice and investment advice stay with the specialists who provide them. What changes is that one party holds the whole picture, agrees each scope, and stops two firms doing the same work.
- Can you work across several jurisdictions?
- Yes, and most of our family office work is multi-jurisdictional. The register is built to hold obligations in every jurisdiction the structure touches, and local advisers are instructed and coordinated where local law or a reserved activity requires it.
- How do you handle confidentiality?
- Information is segmented by need, not seniority, matters are handled anonymously where possible, and nothing about a client is named in anything we publish. External advisers are instructed on what they need for their piece of work and no more.
- What does it cost?
- A fixed monthly retainer, scoped after a Scope Analysis in which we look at the structure and agree what the function covers. The point of a fixed fee is that nobody hesitates to pick up the phone, which is the behaviour that prevents most of the expensive problems.
- Do you give tax advice?
- No. Tax computation, filing positions and regulated tax planning are matters for chartered tax advisers, and we instruct and coordinate them. We hold the commercial and contractual position and make sure the tax answer is actually implemented in the documents.
- How quickly can you build the register?
- The first version usually exists within the first ninety days, built from documents that already exist rather than from a questionnaire the office has to complete. It is deliberately the first deliverable, because nothing else can be prioritised sensibly without it.
- We already have a family office manager. Where do you fit?
- Alongside them. The manager runs the office; we hold the legal and contractual operating layer beneath it, so the manager is not the person deciding whether a covenant has been breached or whether a supplier’s terms have quietly changed.