Spear’s Review

Liz Palmer is a partner and head of private wealth at Howard Kennedy, where she provides clients with advice on inheritance tax mitigation and devolution of family wealth.

Palmer tells Spear’s she often works with ‘entrepreneurial clients, with a focus on succession and family businesses, and non-UK resident and non-dom clients’. 

While many matriarchs and patriarchs have stepped up succession plans in recent years, bringing the next-gen into family businesses and inheritance plans, she says first-generation entrepreneurs often delay the process. 

‘Many successful entrepreneurs haven’t yet reached the point in their lives where they want to start giving things away. They’re still looking to generate new wealth, re-use it to grow a business or start a new venture, or to begin angel investing,’ she says. ‘You see more succession planning happening when the senior family member no longer needs to control all of that wealth.’

In any case, she is always there to help her clients: ‘It can be a bit frightening, a bit confusing, and [my role is] to get their affairs tidied up as neatly and as painlessly as possible.’

Adviser Profile

Liz Palmer’s clients are diverse, but what they all have in common is a need for clear, commercial, and tax-driven private wealth planning advice to achieve succession without dispute. She leads the private wealth sector and private client and family teams.

Palmer advises wealthy families, business owners, property investors and creative clients about inheritance tax mitigation and the devolution of family wealth. She regularly acts for non-UK res/dom individuals and specialises in the creation of offshore trusts.

Her practice has a UK/US estate planning focus and often involves cross-border succession planning for international clients with personal and business assets all over the world.