Top Ten Tax & Trust Lawyers

The past 12 months have seen Boodle Hatfield’s private client head Simon Rylatt guiding clients through a haze of change.

Is he worried about the UK’s appeal to HNWs? ‘Always,’ he says. ‘We need to retain competitive advantage, but political pressures obviously bring challenges to that.’

His clients are particularly concerned by the clash between transparency and privacy, fuelled by cross-border information-sharing agreements: ‘There’s an acceptance that the authorities want to access and check the data and see that you’re doing the right thing,’ he says. ‘What’s a much harder pill for clients to swallow is that the fight against money laundering and terrorism is being used as a justification for having public registers where people can openly see how wealthy you are and what structures you own. It’s a question of proportionality for a perfectly legitimate cause.’

Rylatt has a strong reputation on the contentious side, though conflict isn’t something the friendly and thoughtful lawyer relishes. He prefers solutions that everybody can live with, drawing from his mature understanding of the emotional and family spheres that surround his clients.

No wonder one client lauds him as ‘amazing, really amazing’.