A cross-border structure is built to hold assets, and it is generally tested first on whether it can transfer them. The corporate documents establish who owns what today. They rarely say anything useful about what happens when a principal dies, and the family discovers the omission at the point when the people who could have addressed it are no longer available to be consulted.
The difficulty is not that succession was overlooked. It is that it was addressed in one jurisdiction, usually the one where the family originated, and the structure has since acquired assets, entities and members in several others. A document drafted against one legal system is being asked to operate across four, and the question of whether it does is answered by each of those systems separately.
Why one will is rarely sufficient
Jurisdictions differ on which law governs succession to an estate, and the answer may turn on the deceased’s nationality, domicile or habitual residence, and may differ for immovable property, which is frequently governed by the law of the place where it is located. A single will drafted under one system may therefore be effective as to some assets and ineffective as to others, and the family will not know which until it is administered.
Forced heirship adds a further layer. A number of civil law jurisdictions reserve defined shares of an estate to particular relatives, and those provisions may apply irrespective of the terms of a will and irrespective of where the will was made. A family whose members are resident in both a forced heirship jurisdiction and a jurisdiction with testamentary freedom is operating under two incompatible default positions, and a structure that ignores this produces a dispute rather than a distribution.
A structure that holds assets competently and cannot transfer them has solved the easier half of the problem.
What sits alongside the corporate documents
Where a foundation or a trust holds the assets, its constitutional documents govern what happens on the founder’s death, and they should say so expressly rather than by implication. Council or trustee succession, the mechanism for appointing replacements, the treatment of reserved powers on incapacity as well as on death, and the position of beneficiaries in each relevant jurisdiction all belong in the documents themselves and not in an understanding held by the family.
Alongside them sit the arrangements for assets held directly: wills covering the jurisdictions where those assets are located, drafted so that they operate together rather than revoking one another, which is a common and expensive drafting failure. Then the practical instruments that are needed before death rather than after it — powers of attorney effective in each relevant jurisdiction, and directions covering incapacity — because a structure whose principal is alive but unable to act is frozen just as effectively as one whose principal has died.
The document nobody drafts
The final item is an account of the structure itself: what entities exist, where they are registered, what they hold, who the advisers are, where the records are kept and what each element was intended to achieve. It is not a legal instrument and it is frequently the most valuable document in the file, because the persons who will administer the estate are not the persons who built the structure and will otherwise reconstruct it from registry searches.
Its absence is what turns an ordinary administration into a long one. Executors discovering entities they did not know existed, in jurisdictions the family did not mention, holding assets whose purpose is unrecorded, will proceed cautiously and slowly, and the cost falls on the estate. Preparing and maintaining that account is unglamorous work that belongs with the structure’s ordinary administration rather than with its succession planning, and it is best updated whenever the structure changes rather than reviewed once a decade.
This note is general in application and does not constitute legal, tax or regulatory advice. It describes practice observed across institutions and should not be relied upon in relation to any particular estate.