Legal Counsel for Private Wealth Clients, Family Offices, and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals in the UAE
JUR advises the families, dynasties, and ultra-high-net-worth individuals who have built extraordinary wealth in the UAE and internationally, delivering counsel of the depth, discretion, and institutional quality that preserving and transferring that wealth across generations demands.
Practice Overview
The UAE has emerged as one of the world’s two or three most significant jurisdictions for private wealth structuring, succession planning, and multi-generational family governance. The combination of a zero-income-tax environment, internationally recognised financial and legal frameworks in DIFC and ADGM, a rapidly maturing trust and foundations law architecture, and the UAE’s strategic position as a global residence destination for ultra-high-net-worth individuals has created demand for legal counsel of an entirely different order from that which characterised the market a decade ago. Families with assets measured in hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, held across multiple jurisdictions, require practitioners who combine deep technical competence with the judgment and discretion that matters of this significance demand.
JUR’s Private Wealth and Family Offices practice advises clients at the intersection of UAE onshore succession law, DIFC Trusts Law (DIFC Law No. 4 of 2018), ADGM Foundations Regulations, and international succession frameworks spanning English law, civil law, and common law jurisdictions. Our mandate extends well beyond structural legal advice. We counsel families on governance architecture designed for generational resilience, dispute prevention mechanisms within family constitutions, and the comprehensive legal protection of wealth across jurisdictions including cross-border estate planning for principals with assets in the UAE, Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
Trust and Foundation Structuring
DIFC and ADGM trust and private foundation establishment for asset protection, succession planning, and philanthropic objectives, including purpose trusts, STAR trusts, reserved powers structures, and protector arrangements.
Family Office Legal Architecture
Governance frameworks including family constitutions and charters, shareholder and partnership agreements, family council structures, investment policy statements, and inter-generational wealth transfer mechanisms
Cross-Border Estate Planning
Coordination of UAE succession law, DIFC Wills, and international testamentary instruments for multi-jurisdictional estates spanning GCC, European, South Asian, and North American jurisdictions
Wealth Protection
Structuring assets against litigation risk, creditor claims, forced heirship regimes, and adverse jurisdictional succession rules, including holding company architecture and trust interposition strategies.
UAE Wills and Probate
DIFC Wills Service Centre registration for non-Muslim expatriates and internationally mobile clients, mirror will structures, and property-specific testamentary instruments for UAE-based assets.
Family Business Succession
Legal structuring of ownership and management transitions in family-owned enterprises, including holding company restructuring, shareholder agreement design, and minority shareholder rights protections.
Philanthropy and Waqf
Establishment of charitable foundations, Waqf endowment structures, and international philanthropic vehicles, including donor-advised fund arrangements and Islamic philanthropic structure advisory.
Matrimonial Agreements
Drafting and enforcement of pre-nuptial and post-nuptial agreements under UAE, English, and civil law frameworks, and legal advisory on family property disputes for high-net-worth clients.
Residency and Citizenship
UAE Golden Visa structuring and applications, long-term residency advisory, establishment of UAE tax residency, and coordination of residency and domicile status for internationally mobile principals.
Why Global Institutions Choose JUR
Private wealth engagements of genuine consequence require practitioners who bring both the technical mastery of complex multi-jurisdictional legal structures and the institutional judgment that advising families on matters of generational importance demands. JUR operates at the confluence of UAE onshore law, DIFC, and ADGM, the three principal legal systems within which private wealth in the UAE is structured, with the multi-framework fluency to advise on structures that span all three simultaneously. Every private wealth mandate at JUR is led by a senior practitioner with sustained experience in the region’s most significant wealth structuring engagements.
