A question came up on a client call a few weeks ago that nobody could answer.

The family has a global footprint. Entities, trusts and a foundation across several jurisdictions, with tax and legal advisers in each place. A restructuring was being planned, and we asked whether a particular step would create a tax liability somewhere.

Reasonable question. It should have taken ten minutes.

Instead it took weeks, because answering it required facts that no single person in the conversation held. Each adviser knew their own part really well. None of them could see how it joined up to anyone else's. So everyone started reconstructing the picture from old emails, prior engagement notes and what they remembered being told at the time.

The interesting part was that no one was disagreeing about the advice. They were unclear about the facts.

One adviser believed an entity sat in a different place than it did. Another was working from a structure chart that had been superseded twice. The principal was unaware of an arrangement that mattered a great deal to the question being asked.

That is the gap I want you to think about, because it is the most under-examined risk in complex family wealth, and it does not look like a risk at all.

The quality of the advice you receive is capped by the quality of the information it is built on. Not by the quality of the adviser.

You can hire the best tax counsel in a jurisdiction and still get an answer that is wrong for your situation, because the answer was correct for the situation they were shown.

And in a most cross-border family engagements, nobody is being shown the whole situation. Not out of carelessness. By design.

Each adviser is engaged for a defined scope. The engagement letter says so. They are paid to be experts on one part and explicitly not responsible for the rest, which is sensible for them and dangerous for you, because it means the gaps between their scopes are the one place where no professional has any obligation at all.

Those gaps are exactly where a restructuring goes wrong.

So what do families usually try?

The first instinct is to find one adviser who can cover everything. A single firm with reach across every jurisdiction and discipline. Sometimes that helps. But it rarely covers the whole picture either, and when it does, you have solved a coordination problem by creating a dependency problem. Now the complete view of your family sits inside one firm instead of five, and you are no closer to holding it yourself.

The second instinct is to get everyone in a room. More meetings, better meetings, everyone on the call together.

That is better, and it is still not the fix. A meeting is a conversation, not a record. Facts assembled out loud decay almost immediately. Three months later a new question arrives, a slightly different group is on the call, and the same reconstruction begins again. You have paid four professionals to rebuild the same picture for the third time this year.

The fix is duller than either of those, and it works.

The family holds the picture itself, written down, and gives it to every adviser at the start of any piece of work.

Not a dashboard. Not a valuation report. A plain, current, documented account of what exists and why:

→ Every entity, trust and foundation, where it is established, who controls it and who benefits.

→ What each one actually holds, and what it was set up to do.

→ The decisions behind the structure. Why this entity exists, what the reasoning was at the time, what has changed since.

→ The obligations attached to each part. Filings, renewals, reporting, in which jurisdiction and when.

→ What has changed in the last year, so nobody is working from a chart that is two versions old.

None of that is difficult to produce. It is tedious, which is why it usually does not exist. But it is the difference between four advisers guessing at the same question and four advisers answering it from the same page.

The second order effect is the one that surprised the family I was working with. Once everyone was looking at the same facts, the disagreements that remained were useful. They were about judgement, interpretation and risk appetite, which is what you are actually paying these people for. The disagreements that had been eating the time were never about judgement. They were about who had the correct version of a fact.

There is a reason this has to sit with the family rather than with any one of the advisers, and it is simply standing. No adviser has the right, the scope or the mandate to hold the whole thing. The family does. It is the only party in the arrangement with a legitimate interest in every piece of it.

If you want to test where you stand, there is a quick and slightly brutal way to do it. Before the next significant piece of work, ask each of your advisers to describe your structure in writing. Not their part of it. The whole thing, as they understand it.

Then put the answers next to each other.

Whatever they have in common is what is actually documented. Everything else is being carried in somebody's memory, and memory is not a structure you can restructure from.

That’s all from me.

— Amin Naj