Private Clients
Building Security for Private Wealth
Practice Areas | Private Clients
Our top-ranked Private Client Practice combines specialized expertise with the personal dedication private clients require. Our clients are individuals and families, family offices, private foundations, trusts and private banks. We assist our clients in a wide range of areas including estate and succession planning, corporate governance and shareholder structures, asset management and protection, prenuptial agreements and divorces, citizenship and residency, as well as charity and philanthropy, providing integrated legal and tax advice.
Our Family Business Practice advises family businesses and entrepreneurial families in navigating the unique challenges at the intersection of family and business. We support clients in structuring and implementing succession plans and establishing and integrating appropriate family business governance structures. In conflict situations, we also assist entrepreneurial families as mediators.
We support entrepreneurial families in developing their own family strategy and defining their approach to the family business. In doing so, we combine legal advice with a systemic approach, facilitating constructive and value-creating dialogue within the family and helping to establish a governance framework that reflects the family’s shared objectives.
We establish new private foundations and review and adapt existing structures, advising founders and beneficiaries as well as members of foundation boards. Our Private Client Practice also handles related disputes, ranging from intergenerational and divorce-related conflicts to disputes with third parties, such as creditors seeking access to family assets.
Individuals and families increasingly hold assets across multiple jurisdictions, giving rise to complex cross-border probate proceedings and requiring courts to apply foreign inheritance law. We assist clients in protecting their interests in these challenging situations, drawing on our in-depth knowledge of Austrian and foreign inheritance law and our experience with international succession matters.
Our Private Client Practice has extensive experience in implementing sophisticated estate and succession planning solutions, both inter vivos and causa mortis, through private foundations, family holding structures, wills, inheritance contracts and prenuptial or shareholders’ agreements. We regularly advise on cross-border structures from a legal and tax perspective and align corporate structures with inheritance law, including to protect family businesses against compulsory portion claims. We also advise on the structuring of family offices.
