Family Offices

Understanding the Legal Needs of Family Offices

Family offices supporting international families must navigate complex legal, tax, and relocation frameworks. Their legal needs extend beyond asset management: they require robust citizenship, residence, tax, and property solutions that align with family governance and long-term continuity. Our role is to deliver the legal and regulatory structure that supports the operational and strategic goals of these families.

Family Office Mobility Issues

Modern family offices increasingly operate across multiple jurisdictions, supporting principals and family members who live, work, study or retire internationally. This creates complex questions around residence status, citizenship rights, tax exposure, reporting obligations and property ownership.

CCLEX focuses on these personal and mobility-driven dimensions, helping family offices understand how legal status and physical presence translate into rights, obligations and long-term optionality.

Residence and Citizenship as Mobility Assets

At CCLEX, we treat residence and citizenship as a distinct, strategic asset class: mobility assets, rather than administrative outcomes. Each carries different attributes: durability, flexibility, scope of rights, and intergenerational continuity, which must be assessed in light of a family’s global footprint.

We advise family offices on how these mobility assets can be acquired, preserved and coordinated across jurisdictions, ensuring that residence and citizenship choices remain aligned with family circumstances, regulatory expectations and long-term planning horizons.

The CCLEX Mobility Assets Spectrum™

The CCLEX Mobility Assets Spectrum™ (MAS) is our proprietary framework for analysing and advising on global mobility. It places residence, permanent residence and citizenship along a structured spectrum, allowing family offices to evaluate:

• the strength and durability of each status,
• the rights and limitations attached to it,
• its interaction with tax residence and reporting obligations, and
• its relevance across generations.

Using the MAS, we help family offices move away from ad-hoc or transactional decisions and towards coherent, forward-looking mobility strategies.

Citizenship and Residence Advisory for Family Offices

Our citizenship and residence lawyers advise family offices on:

• residence and citizenship pathways for principals and family members,
• coordinating multiple residence statuses across jurisdictions,
• pre-immigration and exit considerations, and
• maintaining compliance with residence conditions and renewal requirements.

Our advice is jurisdiction-agnostic and comparative, allowing family offices to assess options across Europe and beyond, rather than being tied to a single programme or country.

Our International Tax Advisory and Compliance Services

CCLEX advises family offices on international tax from a legal and compliance perspective, focusing on how mobility decisions interact with tax exposure and reporting obligations.

We support family offices with:

• international tax advisory linked to residence and relocation,
• coordination of tax positions across multiple jurisdictions,
• treaty interpretation and double tax considerations, and
• ongoing personal tax compliance for internationally mobile family members.

Our role is complementary to external accountants and advisers, ensuring legal consistency and cross-border alignment.

International Property Advisory and Conveyancing

Property often anchors a family’s presence in a jurisdiction. Our property team advises family offices on:

• acquisition and disposal of residential property across destination countries,
• legal due diligence and conveyancing,
• ownership structures aligned with residence and personal use, and
• ongoing compliance with local property and registration requirements.

We work closely with the family office’s wider advisory team to ensure property decisions support broader mobility objectives.

Working Alongside the Family Office Ecosystem

CCLEX works alongside, not instead of, the family office’s existing advisers. We regularly collaborate with trustees, private bankers, investment advisers, accountants and administrators, providing the legal and tax framework that underpins their work.

Our focus is clarity, coordination and legal certainty: particularly where mobility, residence and cross-border living create overlapping obligations.

Our Experience Supporting Family Offices

We have advised single-family and multi-family offices across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia on matters relating to mobility, residence, tax coordination and international property.

Examples of our work include advising on:

• the relocation of a multi-family office to Malta and the establishment of an appropriate compliance framework,
• European residence and tax coordination for an Asian family office supporting internationally mobile principals, and
• the acquisition and consolidation of residential properties across multiple EU jurisdictions for an international family.

Each engagement is handled with confidentiality, precision and discretion, and delivered in close coordination with the family office’s wider advisory network.

How Our Family Office Lawyers Can Help You

CCLEX provides family offices with integrated advice across citizenship, residence, international tax compliance and property, framed through our proprietary Mobility Assets Spectrum™. We help families and their advisers make informed, durable decisions about global mobility – discreetly, independently and with a long-term view.