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Family Offices & Institutional Investors

Finn Dixon & Herling has had long-standing relationships with family office and multi-family office clients since its formation, drawing on practitioners from various practice areas within the firm. For each client relationship, we endeavor to familiarize ourselves with the client’s objectives, priorities, challenges, and sensitivities, with a view to providing customized advice and services that are delivered in an efficient and effective manner. When and as appropriate, we coordinate and collaborate with family members as well as family advisors (such as wealth managers, accountants, brokers, custodians, insurance experts, trusts and estates advisors, and public relations advisors). We provide such clients with a broad range of services tailored to their particular needs, including:

  • Negotiating and drafting the family office’s structure and operating agreements, including its ownership, control, and governance.
  • Regulatory structuring and compliance, including the availability and maintenance of exemptions from registration and their impact on operations and assets.
  • Advising on employment arrangements, including compensation, benefits, profit sharing, covenants, disputes, and terminations.
  • “Family client” arrangements, including internal vehicle structuring and options.
  • Negotiations with service providers, including brokers, administrators, custodians, swap counterparties, consultants, and others.
  • Representation in acquisitions and dispositions of minority and control positions in portfolio companies, private funds, and other investments.
  • Tax planning and analysis.
  • Conversions from family office to registered investment adviser and vice versa.
  • Regulatory and operational compliance.
  • Philanthropy.
  • Commercial litigation.
In addition to family offices, FDH also represents institutional investors in connection with their investment programs. Such institutional investors include asset allocators, wealth managers, private funds, public and private pension funds, foundations, and others. We provide our professional investor clients with insight into the legal nuances of complicated investment structures, tailoring our advice to their particular regulatory, compliance, and operational needs. We have extensive experience negotiating the terms of private fund, co-investment, and other investment vehicles’ operating agreements on behalf of our family office and institutional investor clients. Our deep and up-to-date insight into market terms and trends from our fund formation practice as well as our private equity and venture capital transactional practice informs our advice and negotiations, giving our family office and institutional investor clients an advantage in negotiations over the terms of their investments.