Landed estates bring an array of intricate legal challenges. From succession planning to managing property and staying on top of complex regulations, ultra-high-net-worth families and estate owners need experts who truly understand their needs and can efficiently offer clear and practical advice.
Our 2025 list of the best landed estate lawyers features experts with both deep legal knowledge and hands-on experience in protecting property, resolving disputes and safeguarding family legacy.
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Related
- The best landed estate lawyers: the complete list
- Methodology: how we choose our recommendations
- The best landed estate lawyers: some names to know
- Contact us
The best landed estate lawyers: the complete list
Click on the individual names to be directed to more detailed profiles of each adviser on The Spear’s 500 website. The table is ordered by ranking and then alphabetically by surname.
Methodology: how we choose our recommendations
Each year, the Spear’s Research Unit reassesses and refreshes its rankings of the leading providers in each sector by gathering data from and about the advisers and firms themselves, assessing submission forms, collating nominations, carrying out peer reviews, reviewing data from third-party sources, gathering references and recommendations, canvassing experts and conducting hundreds of interviews.
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Advisers are evaluated using a proprietary scoring system that assigns different weightings to certain attributes. These scores feed directly into each new set of rankings in the Spear’s Indices. Each of these indices are published first online (according to the research calendar) and then in print. Print publication takes the form of the annual Spear’s 500 directory, which includes the top advisers in every index.
[See also: A guide to the Spear's 500: Everything you need to know]
Each featured adviser is profiled on spears500.com. The site allows users to search the Spear’s database of more than 4,000 entities to find one (or more) to meet their specific requirements by filtering for specific attributes such as an adviser’s location, their specialist expertise and information about their client base.
The best landed estate lawyers: some names to know
Edmund Fetherston-Dilke
- Focus: Agricultureal, residential and commercial property
- Position: Partner
- Firm: Farrer & Co
- Rank: Top recommended
Edmund Fetherston-Dilke's landed estates clients include the Duchy of Cornwall, which has land holdings in excess of 130,000 acres.
No stranger to deals in the £10 million to £20 million range, he is noted for his ‘willingness to help and achieve a workable solution at a cost-effective rate’.
Notable work includes the purchase of an estate of over 4,000 acres and the acquisition of an extremely valuable English country house.
Read Edmund Fetherston-Dilke's full profile at Spears500.com
Sarah Jordan
- Focus: Country transactions
- Position: Partner
- Firm: Moore Barlow
- Rank: Top recommended
Sarah Jordan is a partner at Moore Barlow, where she heads up the firm’s rural services practice, working with a variety of landed estates clients and those looking to ‘set up home and connections in the country from a city base’.
This includes current and prospective landowners, farming businesses and families, equestrian businesses, vineyard owners and country house estates. Her practice covers all manner of complex transactions, as well as rural asset management for landed estates and secured agricultural lending.
Read Sarah Jordan's full profile on Spears500.com
James Vernor-Miles
- Focus: UHNWs, landed estates
- Position: Partner, head of residential property
- Firm: Hunters
- Rank: Top recommended
‘My HNW clients range from lords and ladies, captains of industry, international individuals, solicitors and barristers, charities, other law firms … the full range!’ says James Vernor-Miles, a partner and head of property at Hunters.
Vernor-Miles specialises in high-value and complex property, including landed estates and agricultural property. His career started in 1995, but he only knew he had become a trusted adviser when, ‘in the absence of any marketing expenditure, I was introduced to numerous new clients by existing satisfied clients’.
Read James Vernor-Miles' full profile on Spears500.com
Victoria Salter-Galbraith
- Focus: Listed and historic properties
- Position: Counsel and head of historic properties
- Firm: Forsters
- Rank: Recommended
Victoria Salter-Galbraith specialises in rural estates, listed buildings and high-value country houses. ‘I’ve always been interested in architecture, so becoming a property lawyer was a natural bedfellow for that.’
A fellow of the Agricultural Law Association, she leads Forsters’ historic properties group. She has over a decade’s experience advising on UK vineyard acquisitions, a fast-growing sector driven by climate change: ‘We are very much seeing a climate here that even 10 years ago we wouldn’t have had.’
Read Victoria Salter-Galbraith's full profile at Spears500.com
Contact us
- Click here to order a print copy of The Spear’s 500.
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