When ‘stable’ doesn’t mean ‘predictable’: jurisdiction risk for family capital
Family offices don’t choose a jurisdiction for the sunny days. You choose it for the storm.
For many family offices, trusts remain one of the core instruments in the toolkit for succession planning, stewardship and continuity. They are used to hold wealth across generations, separate ownership from day-to-day control, protect vulnerable beneficiaries, preserve privacy and create a legal framework that can outlast the founder.
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A trust, after all, is rarely established simply to hold assets in a static way. In most families, the intention is broader. The trust is meant to preserve a planning logic. It reflects a view about stewardship, timing, responsibility, fairness, protection and legacy. It may be designed to honour a founder’s wishes, but also to give the family a framework within which wealth can be managed after the founder is no longer able to explain, adjust or defend those wishes personally. FOG’s earlier coverage of protectors made the point in practical terms: trustees manage the assets, but the structure is meant to function in light of the settlor’s wishes and the beneficiaries’ interests, with clearly defined oversight mechanisms available where needed.
That is why jurisdiction matters so much, for much like an architect is bound by the laws of physics so the practicalities of a trust are bound by the legal framework of its jurisdiction.
Beyond the jurisdiction brand
Family offices often discuss jurisdictions as if they were brands. Safe. Neutral. Sophisticated. Business-friendly. Well-regulated. These labels are not meaningless, but they can be misleadingly neat. When a family establishes a trust, it is not just choosing the legal wrapper. It is choosing the climate in which that structure will have to operate.
Families today are more international, more layered and more exposed to cross-border complexity than they were even a decade ago. Structures span several countries. Family members live in different places. Businesses are often held through multiple entities. Information moves quickly, and private disputes can spill into public view with little warning.
In calm conditions, many jurisdictions can look equally attractive. They may all appear orderly on the surface, like polished marinas on a summer afternoon. The differences show themselves when the weather changes: when succession is disputed, when capacity is questioned, when beneficiaries challenge fiduciaries, when a protector intervenes, or when the control of a trust, foundation or holding company becomes the subject of urgent proceedings in more than one country.
At that point, the family is no longer relying on a jurisdiction’s reputation alone. It is relying on its process.
That, increasingly, is the more useful way to think about jurisdiction risk for family capital. And we have seen this play out publicly for a number of families across the globe in recent years.
Why families establish trusts in the first place
The attraction of trusts is easy to understand. They can create continuity where personal control cannot last indefinitely. They can preserve assets against dissipation, impose discipline on succession, protect against commercial or personal risk, and create a degree of order where family relationships may become more complex over time. For some families, they are also a way of expressing values: a trust can embody a view about what the wealth is for, who should benefit, when, and under what conditions.
In that sense, a trust holds intention.
That intention might include wealth preservation, family harmony, protection of future generations, support for philanthropy, separation of family politics from fiduciary responsibility, or the avoidance of forced liquidation at moments of transition. Often it is several of these at once.
The difficulty, of course, is that families do not stand still. Children mature in different directions. Marriages, divorces and deaths change the emotional geometry of the family. Businesses evolve. Tax and regulatory regimes shift. Founders rethink what fairness looks like. What felt like sensible control at one point in time may later feel like overreach, exclusion or drift. The trust is meant to provide continuity, but continuity without room to breathe can begin to feel like embalming.
Rigidity, flexibility and fitness for purpose
This is where the discussion becomes more interesting.
In the family office world, rigidity can sometimes masquerade as strength. A tightly drafted structure can look reassuring. A highly controlled framework may feel disciplined. Sometimes it is. But a trust that cannot adapt to the evolving intentions of the principal, or the changing needs of the family, may gradually cease to be fit for purpose.
FOG’s earlier work on governance structures is useful here. It noted that trust and foundation structures can be stable, but that this stability may come with significant agency costs, particularly where the structure is opaque or the settlor becomes incapacitated. It also observed that wealth may remain together but at the cost of heightened risk aversion, governance frictions and gradual depletion over time.
That is an important warning. A trust may succeed in preserving the legal form of a structure while failing to preserve the practical purpose for which it was created. A legally tidy outcome is not always a good family outcome.
The system around the structure
A family office does not experience a jurisdiction as a statute book. It experiences it through people and process: trustees, protectors, judges, court timetables, litigators, expert witnesses, administrators and advisers. When conflict arrives, the depth and quality of that surrounding bench becomes critical.
This is one of the practical lessons from our previous trust dispute coverage (see the webinar linked at the end of this piece).
Predictability does not come from drafting alone. It comes from a structure that contains working mechanisms for oversight, adaptation and intervention. It also comes from a jurisdiction with professionals capable of using those mechanisms well. A well-known trust centre with thin specialist capacity may prove less reliable in practice than a quieter jurisdiction with stronger disputes counsel, better fiduciaries and greater institutional memory.
When succession becomes a jurisdiction fight
The modern form of jurisdiction risk often emerges when a family dispute stops being local.
A founder may live in one country, operate businesses in another, hold core assets through foundations or trusts in a third, and have heirs, advisers or relevant evidence in several more. Once tensions escalate, the legal question no longer sits neatly inside a single document. It moves through connected systems.
The Zygmunt Solorz matter is a useful illustration of both the practical application of unconventional succession mechanisms and the limits of founder protection clauses. Solorz is a Polish billionaire who built a media empire; according to press reports, he inserted a novel “civil death” mechanism into his Liechtenstein foundation statutes in 2022 that would allow him to transfer governance control to his children while alive. This mechanism - formally a declaration of death in life - would extinguish his active powers and transfer decision-making to his children, leaving him with a veto right only. He tested and revoked this mechanism in 2023, then amended the statutes to entrench an unconditional and expressly irrevocable right to revoke any such future declaration.
In 2024, Solorz signed declarations activating the “civil death” mechanism. The day after, he attempted to revoke this transfer, arguing that his entrenched revocation right survived the declaration. This triggered an inter-familial dispute that spilled across Liechtenstein, Poland, Cyprus and the United States, with competing claims over revocation, alleged undue influence, and decision-making capacity. A Liechtenstein court rejected Solorz’s attempt to rely on his revocation clause. Critically, the court accepted this novel mechanism and overruled the founder’s right to revoke it.
For family offices, the Solorz case raises an important cautionary point: even carefully drafted and expressly irrevocable founder protections - such as unconditional revocation rights - which may work when tested in calm waters but may not be upheld in choppier waters where an unconventional succession mechanism is activated, a founder seeks to reverse course and, crucially, the clauses are contested.
The point is not to pass judgement on the validity of the structures or legal judgements but rather how the outcome was dependent on how the jurisdiction reacted when succession planning collided with cross-border structures, contested intentions and urgent control questions. Once that happens, the family is no longer asking whether the structure and jurisdiction looked respectable at the outset. It is asking which forum controls the structure, what evidence can be obtained where, how quickly interim decisions can be made, and whether the legal system can distinguish between a valid succession step and a deeply disputed one.
In that environment, the legal structure is the vessel. Jurisdiction determines how it behaves in rough water.
A comparison: the Murdoch trust dispute
The Murdoch dispute provides a useful contrast because it put the trust itself at the centre of the succession question.
Reuters reported in September 2024 that Rupert Murdoch was seeking, in a closed Nevada probate proceeding, to amend the family trust that holds major voting stakes in Fox and News Corp. Under the existing arrangement, control would otherwise be shared among Murdoch’s four oldest children after his death. Reuters later reported in December 2024, citing the New York Times’ account of a sealed decision, that Murdoch failed in that bid, with the commissioner concluding that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch had acted in bad faith in seeking to amend the irrevocable trust. Reuters also noted that the ruling was subject to judicial approval and possible challenge.
What makes the Murdoch matter instructive is the contrast with Solorz. The comparison is useful at the level of governance stress, not because the two disputes are legally identical. In the Solorz dispute, the pressure arose around whether control had been validly transferred and then contested across several jurisdictions, with competing claims about revocation, influence and decision-making. In the Murdoch case, the pressure point lay within the trust architecture itself: whether an existing arrangement could be altered to reshape future control among family members, and whether that attempted adaptation satisfied the legal standard applied by the court.
Taken together, the two disputes illuminate different edges of the same problem. One shows how succession conflict can spill across borders and become a contest over forum, evidence and control. The other shows how an irrevocable trust can become the battleground for a struggle over amendment, fairness and future governance. Different structures, different procedural settings, same underlying lesson: what matters is how the system responds when power and intention are disputed.
What family offices should actually assess
This is why the real question is not which jurisdiction looks best in a presentation, but which one is most predictable for this family and this structure under stress.
That means asking harder questions. Whether at establishment or in review.
How does the jurisdiction treat contested amendments, revocations or exercises of reserved powers? How are allegations of incapacity, undue influence, misrepresentation or mistake likely to be tested? What interim remedies are realistically available? How quickly can trustees, protectors or directors be replaced? How deep is the local bench of fiduciaries and trust disputes specialists? How are foreign proceedings, foreign evidence and parallel claims handled? If the family loses confidence in a service provider, how easy is it to change course without destabilising the whole arrangement?
The softer questions matter as well. Does the fiduciary market encourage judgment or standardisation? Will the family receive real engagement, or procedural cover? Is there enough specialist depth to support difficult decisions without every conflict becoming existential?
Those questions belong at the design stage, not only at the moment of crisis.
Choosing a port for the storm
Trusts remain one of the most important tools available to family offices for succession planning, stewardship and continuity. That is exactly why jurisdiction deserves more scrutiny than a list of familiar labels.
For family capital, the lesson is straightforward. A jurisdiction is not chosen only for prestige, tax coherence or political calm. It is chosen for how it behaves when the weather turns. A trust that is too loose may drift. A trust that is too rigid may cease to serve the family it was meant to protect. The art lies in building a structure strong enough to endure, but supple enough to remain useful.
From the archive (1h40m on Trust Arbitration):
References
Reuters, “Judge concludes hearing to determine fate of Murdoch media empire,” September 23, 2024.
New York Times, “Inside the deal ending the Murdoch succession fight,” September 8, 2025.
Financial Times, “Family feud sparks succession battle at Polish tycoon’s business empire” December 5, 2025
Newsweek, “Polish Billionaire Asks California Judge to Help Uncover Kids’ Plot to Take Control of Company”
Business Insider, “This is the end of “Succession” in Polish. The story of the dispute over Zygmunt Solorz’s empire.”
Caveat Emptor | This article is not legal, investment or tax advice.