PRIVATE CLIENTS + ESTATE PLANNING
Our private client lawyers are trusted advisers who provide high-quality legal services of a personal and private nature to individuals, families, and small businesses with a particular focus on wealth protection and estate planning.
Mangioni Biggs + Co provides advice in relation to highly significant and often sensitive personal matters to a diverse range of clients.
We offer advisory and drafting services for private clients in respect of estate planning and the generational transfer of wealth. Where required, our team provides strategic advice to protect assets, including consideration of existing trusts, superannuation, and the implementation of testamentary discretionary trusts. We act for high-net-worth individuals, their families, and businesses to ensure that their estate structure maximises and preserves value.
Our referrers include accountants, financial advisers, stockbrokers, lawyers, and other professionals.
Our lawyers have extensive experience in the following:
INTERGENERATIONAL WEALTH MANAGEMENT
We provide asset protection and wealth management advice to assist our clients’ business succession planning and their family’s private estate planning needs. Our sophisticated advice is bespoke and crafted to suit our client’s specific circumstances and desired outcomes.
Our solutions are designed for a diverse range of complexities for clients including:
- High-net-worth individuals
- Start-up founders
- CEOs and other C-suite executives
- SMEs (including Sole Traders)
- Family offices
- Sophisticated investors
- Self-funded retirees
- Attorneys and Guardians
- Families at all stages of life
In order to provide our clients with the best outcomes, we undertake a thorough review of their current personal and financial circumstances. Advice is often then given on the following types of matters:
- Domestic and international estate planning
- Harmonising lifetime (inter vivos) gifts to certain children with estate (testamentary) gifts to others
- Advising on how business and personal assets and trusts work together
- Distribution options for non-estate assets such as superannuation benefits and life insurance proceeds
- Assisting with intra-family loans and financial agreements
- Optimising outcomes for blended families, balancing the interests of current and former spouses, children and step-children
ESTATE + SUCCESSION PLANNING
Our private client team advises on all areas of estate planning including:
- Simple wills
- Complex wills including the creation of testamentary discretionary trusts, life estates, special disability trusts
- Powers of attorney
- Appointment of enduring guardians
- Strategic consideration of other factors involved in estate planning and the transfer of wealth among families, including:
- Existing trusts
- Business and personal succession planning
- Estate planning for self-managed superannuation funds
- Consideration of claims by non-beneficiaries/family provision claims
- Statements of intention and wishes
- Guidance to attorneys & guardians in respect of their roles
- Intra-family loans and financial agreements
ESTATE ADMINISTRATION
Our team assists executors, beneficiaries and claimants in the administration of estates after a family member has passed away.
This can involve:
- Applications for probate, including complex estates
- Applications for letters of administration where an individual dies without a will
- Family provision claims, including all aspects of estate litigation, where an eligible beneficiary is not included in a will or insufficient provision is made. We can assist the executors, claimants and other named beneficiaries as and when required
- Preparation of deeds of family arrangement where agreement is reached among family members for a distribution not in accordance with a will
- Other elder law matters including applications to NCAT where required
If a dispute does arise, we seek first to navigate those sorts of challenges through alternative dispute resolution processes, such as mediation, to try to head off unnecessary Court action.
BUSINESS + SUCCESSION ADVICE FOR FAMILY ENTERPRISES
Our lawyers can ably assist with various types of commercial and business issues, including:
- Establishing self-managed superannuation funds
- Advice on death benefit nominations
- Next generation succession advice for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
- Establishing family discretionary trusts
- Advice on property investment trusts and unit trusts
- Advice to directors and shareholders of family businesses
- Drafting of related documentation such as company resolutions for directors and shareholders, shareholder and joint venture agreements, and loan and security agreements
Further information about our Commercial team can be found here: Commercial Expertise
CONVEYANCING + PROPERTY TRANSACTIONS + INVESTMENTS
Buying or selling property can be a complex, and confusing process, and there are many legal and practical pitfalls to consider. Our lawyers help to smooth out the complexities, to side-step the problems, and to make it as simple as possible.
Our team has extensive expertise in a wide range of property transactional and investment work, and can oversee all aspects of your property affairs including:
- Conveyancing for the buying and selling of residential and investment property
- Drafting contracts for the sale of land, financing agreements and other contracts, and residential, commercial, industrial and retail leases
- Assisting first home buyers purchase their first home and making applications for related government stamp duty exemptions (transfer duty)
- Assisting with all stages of property developments, as well as applications for easements and negotiations with other land holders
- Review of contracts and advice in relation to retirement villages, aged care facilities and disability residential care facilities
- Assisting with Local Council issues and neighbourhood disputes
Further information about our Property team can be found here: Property Expertise
MATTERS OF PERSONAL SIGNIFICANCE
While private clients matters are commonly only small in value, they usually take on much more significant personal value, and these matters therefore need to be treated with the same high level of competence as we deal with all of our larger commercial matters. Our private clients lawyers understand and respect this, and consistently ensure that all of our private clients matters are handled accordingly.
We act on all personal and private matters, including:
- Estate planning
- Preparation and probate of wills and other testamentary dispositions
- Family Provisions Act advice
- Intestate estates (where there is no will)
- Estate disputes
- Local Council issues
- Personal and family financial arrangements
- Family trusts (including both inter vivos and testamentary trusts)
- Powers of attorney (including enduring powers of attorney) and guardianship documents
- Residential conveyancing
- Residential leasing
- Rural landholdings
- Neighbour disputes
- Nursing home contracts
DISPUTE RESOLUTION + LITIGATION SUPPORT SERVICES
Sometimes things don’t go to plan and our clients need help managing a challenge against an estate or assistance with a property or commercial dispute. Our expert litigation team will then step in and assist our clients to manage those disputes, including through alternative dispute resolution processes wherever possible, and otherwise as and when formal Court proceedings are commenced.
Further information about our Litigation team can be found here: Litigation Expertise