Edward Reed

Spear’s Review

A go-to sage at Macfarlanes for international UHNWs seeking advice on wills, trusts and personal tax planning, Edward Reed has spent his career dealing with ‘Western European matters’. It’s something he is well suited to handling, having spent his formative years in France.

Reed owns property there, so his take on continental thinking isn’t the ‘purely academic’ exercise it is for other lawyers. ‘A lot of what a lawyer does is translating other people’s strange codes into some of form of comprehensible vernacular for the punter,’ he says.

Tax law has acquired a rather ‘fiddly’ language of its own: ‘There’s no chance of the man in the street being able to follow tax provisions or doing a deal without advice any longer.’