Laura Cochrane is a newly appointed partner in our commercial and private clients practice, providing legal and commercial advice to a broad range of private clients, including ultra-high net worth individuals, family offices and private corporations.
We talked to Laura about the rewards and challenges of working with private clients across a range of personal and business-related matters, and how the unprecedented intergenerational wealth transfer has impacted her practice.
Your practice spans everything from succession and estate planning to business acquisitions and restructures. What is it about this broad combination of work that appeals to you and what are the challenges?
I advise high net worth families and family offices across the full range of issues they encounter. This includes establishing family offices and governance structures and providing advice, to significant transactions, investments, restructures and, when the time comes, intergenerational wealth transfer. That breadth means I am focused on something different every day.
What makes private client work particularly rewarding is that the relationship rarely begins and ends with a single transaction. You accompany clients as they move through different stages of their personal lives, through the life cycle of their businesses, and the evolution of their family offices. Over time, you develop a deep understanding of the family, its assets and investments, and what its members are ultimately trying to achieve.
That objective is not always immediately apparent when a client first comes to see you. It may not yet be entirely clear to the client either. A conversation might begin as an estate planning matter but reveal that what the client is really grappling with is an exit from a business they founded decades ago, or how the next generation should participate in its ownership and management. Part of our role is to ask the right questions and help clients work through what they really want before advising them on how to achieve it.
That is also what makes the work challenging. It requires strong transactional and technical expertise, but also judgment, curiosity and an understanding of complex personal and family dynamics.
You've been advising high net worth individuals, families and private businesses for more than a decade. During that time, how has the conversation evolved, and what are clients thinking about differently today?
It's not so much that the conversation has changed, but rather the scale and immediacy of the issues. Intergenerational wealth transfer is now happening in real time.
At the same time, uncertainty around tax and broader government policy, most recently in relation to trusts and capital gains tax, has made high-quality, commercially grounded advice more important than ever. Clients need advisers who understand not only the law, but their structures, their family, their businesses and their long-term vision, and who can support them make decisions as both external circumstances, and their own personal situations, change.
"Avoiding disputes requires a robust, integrated succession plan that addresses the ownership and control of all those assets."
As significant wealth passes from one generation to the next, there has been increasing attention on disputes over estates and the importance of getting estate planning right. What are some of the common issues that can lead to disputes, and what can families do now to reduce the risk of conflict later?
For ultra-high net worth families, it is rarely just about the will. Wealth may be held through trusts, companies and other investment structures, often alongside operating businesses and assets in multiple jurisdictions. Avoiding disputes requires a robust, integrated succession plan that addresses the ownership and control of all those assets. This succession plan needs to be revisited regularly as circumstances change, whether because of a death or divorce in the family, the sale of a business or the needs of a family member with a disability.
Transparency is also fundamental. Families can be reluctant to talk openly about wealth and succession. Some find conversations about death difficult, while others avoid them for fear of creating conflict. But a lack of communication often creates the conditions for conflict later.
We still see gender-based assumptions, such as patriarchs entrusting the management of businesses and investments to their sons but not their daughters, as well as children inheriting significant assets without the knowledge or experience needed to manage them.
Even where the arrangements are intended to be fair, a lack of transparency can lead to misunderstanding, resentment and, ultimately, disputes.
You've spent your entire legal career at Arnold Bloch Leibler. What has made ABL the right place to build your practice?
A key reason is that I practise in the private client space and this work has been at the heart of Arnold Bloch Leibler since the firm’s inception 75 years ago. ABL occupies a unique position in that market. We have the transactional expertise and breadth of capability to advise ultra-high net worth families and family offices comprehensively, while also understanding the personal and family considerations that inform their decisions. Few firms can credibly bring those elements together in the way that we do.
Another reason is that ABL encourages lawyers to bring their whole selves to work and forge their own paths. We’re not expected to fit a particular mould or become clones of the partners who came before us.
I have a young family, I work part time, and I have recently been appointed to the partnership. I think that speaks volumes about the kind of firm ABL is.
