"Highly sought after for . . . expertise in complicated international wealth management matters, especially those with complicated US tax aspects"
- Chambers USA

Cadwalader’s Private Client Department provides effective and creative personal, financial, charitable, and tax planning to individual clients and closely-held family companies. Members of the Department provide clients with a broad range of services, with particular emphasis on the preservation of wealth and the minimization of wealth transfer and income taxation.

High-Net-Worth Families
We offer unparalleled estate planning services to high-net worth individuals, families, and their closely-held companies. As a small practice group within a full service international law firm, we are able to provide the kind of confidential, personal advice and attention that people expect from a long-time family lawyer, while drawing on the global resources and expertise of our banking, corporate, litigation and securities lawyers.

We represent U.S. citizens and residents and foreign nationals on a global basis and imaginatively respond to their needs, often by crafting estate plans using structures and entities such as domestic and foreign limited partnerships, corporations, limited liability companies, private trust companies, and private and charitable trusts, either alone or in combination. These structures are intended to provide long-term wealth transfer planning while ensuring a minimum of income, gift, estate, and other U.S. and non-U.S. transfer and asset-based taxes. Our attorneys provide advice that enables clients to transfer assets among family members and between generations, smoothly change control of family businesses, and make creative charitable donations.

This broad expertise naturally extends to providing individual clients with advice on the most personal of family questions, such as living wills; health care proxies; prenuptial and postnuptial agreements; and separation, divorce and child custody issues. We routinely administer large and complex trusts and estates and handle contested and non-contested probate and trust matters for executors, trustees, and beneficiaries. Our attorneys, who are supported by a staff of fiduciary accountants, also prepare estate, trust, committee and guardianship accountings.

Institutions
In addition to our private clients, we represent numerous institutions of every type, such as banks, corporations, museums, not-for-profit entities, foundations and charities. We provide these entities the kind of expert tax, corporate governance, and planning advice that can only be delivered by a law firm of Cadwalader's size and prominence. We assist trust and private client departments with due diligence, know-your-customer, and tax compliance strategies. We also assist bank and corporate clients in developing training programs for their staff. In addition, we help draft form trust agreements for use in the U.S. and, with local counsel, develop trust agreements for use in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jersey, Guernsey, England and Wales. We develop tax minimization strategies and accounting procedures for our institutional clients' trust beneficiaries in high-tax jurisdictions, such as the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and other European Union countries, in addition to jurisdictions developing more sophisticated worldwide tax regimes such as Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina.