“He is very clear thinking with a personal touch.”
Legal 500 UK, 2024
About
Jim heads the firm’s Private Client Services team and specialises in tax, trusts and estate planning.
His client base is broad and he advises UK and offshore clients, entrepreneurs, landed and farming clients, trustees and family offices on how families should hold and protect their assets and pass them down to the next generation. He has a particular focus on family businesses and succession issues and structures for holding wealth, whether through trusts, companies or partnerships. He also advises on high value and complex probates, often with an international or technical inheritance tax focus, and acts as a family trustee.
Jim founded and ran a number of start-up businesses before joining Burges Salmon.
He is a prize-winning member of STEP, ranked lawyer in the Chambers, Legal 500 and Spears 500 directories, and sits on the Law Society’s Capital Taxes Sub-committee.
Experience
- Farming families: Advising on some of the highest value farm partnership restructures in the UK, often with a contentious element.
- Family business restructuring: Advising on partitions of companies to split ownership between old and new generations.
- Family business succession: Advising on introducing the next generation into family businesses, including family charters, governance arrangements, asset transfers and trusts.
- International families and trustees – advising on the creation, management and termination of offshore structures and long-term wealth holding structures.
- Probate and estates: Advising executors and trustees on succession to landed estates and family businesses, often with a contentious element.
Credentials
- Admitted as a solicitor: England & Wales (2004)
- Member of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEP)