Family Offices Editing and Proofreading Services

A family office manages two things that pull against each other: a portfolio, and a family. The investment documents can be excellent while the family documents are absent, and it is almost always the second gap that causes the damage — a succession nobody discussed, a next generation that has never seen a balance sheet, a distribution policy that exists only in the founder's head. Writing is how a family office converts one person's judgement into something that survives them, and most offices postpone that writing until the moment it is needed, which is the worst possible moment to attempt it.

We edit what family offices and their advisers produce — family constitutions and governance charters, investment policy statements and asset allocation frameworks, consolidated reporting packs across entities and custodians, distribution and drawdown policies, next-generation education material and family meeting packs, succession and continuity plans, philanthropy strategies and grant documentation, direct investment memoranda and co-investment summaries, manager selection and due diligence documentation, service provider agreements and fee reviews, risk registers covering cyber, reputational and physical security, and trustee and family council reporting. Our editors work with extremely sensitive material and are used to redacted or anonymised documents where you prefer.

The family constitution is the document with the highest ratio of value to word count, and it is the one most often drafted as a set of aspirations. Statements about shared values and stewardship read well and settle nothing. We work on these so the document does what it exists to do: state who may join the family council and how, how a decision is actually made when the family disagrees, what happens to a member who wants liquidity when the others do not, whether in-laws and adopted and step-children are included and in what respects, how a family member is employed by the business or the office and on what terms, and what the process is for amending the constitution itself. Each of these is uncomfortable to write and vastly more uncomfortable to improvise during a bereavement or a divorce. The families who do this well tend to be the ones whose constitution names the disagreements rather than the values.

Everything you send is treated in the strictest confidence, and we are accustomed to material where discretion is the client's principal concern. We are editors rather than legal, tax or investment advisers, and nothing we provide is advice of any kind — your professional advisers must settle the substance. What we can do is make these documents clear, complete and readable by the family members who will have to live with them.