Five areas handled end to end.
Corporate Law & M&A
Acquisitions, disposals, restructurings, shareholders' agreements, corporate governance. For executives, reference shareholders and Swiss or European funds.
The firm handles some twenty mid-size transactions per year, from the letter of intent through to post-closing execution. Our role is as often that of advisor alongside the executive as that of lead negotiator. We act indifferently on the buy side or sell side, for owner-operators as well as financial sponsors.
Estates & Wealth Planning
Lead: Catherine Mercier
★ Historic coreFamily transmissions, fiduciary structures, trusts, succession agreements, holding companies. The historic core of the firm, and the area that accounts for most of our long-term client base.
We accompany wealthy families over the long term — often across two or three generations — from initial structuring to effective transmission. Our files deploy indifferently under pure Swiss law, in interaction with an English or Jersey trust, or in coordination with continental civil jurisdictions.
Detailed page: Estates & Wealth Planning →Tax Structures
Holding companies, foundations, double taxation treaties, international structuring of wealth and participations.
Taxation, in our experience, is not an autonomous discipline: it extends corporate law and private wealth law, and constrains them. We therefore approach it downstream — not as a starting point, but as the ultimate test of a structure's solidity.
Litigation & Arbitration
Commercial disputes, shareholder litigation, Swiss (Swiss Rules, ICC) and international arbitration proceedings.
Litigation at our firm is almost always the continuation of prior advisory work. The firm does not accept purely contentious mandates from clients whose affairs it has not previously known. This rule has a reason: a well-defended court case begins with an exact reading of what came before it.
Private International Law
Conflicts of laws and jurisdictions, cross-border estates, patrimonial and residential mobility, enforcement of foreign judgments.
More than half of the firm's clients are international or multi-resident. Private international law is, in this regard, less a specialty than a condition of practice. We practise it in close coordination with correspondents in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore and Dubai.
A case that straddles several of these areas is the rule, not the exception.