Some conferences leave you with a stack of business cards and a vague sense of having sat through too many PowerPoint slides. The Contentious Trusts Circle Europe is not that conference.
Held from 22 to 24 April 2026 at Le Mirador Resort & Spa in Vevey, Switzerland — with the Alps doing their usual work in the background — this invitation-only retreat, organised by Thought Leaders 4 High Net Worth, is built around something refreshingly rare in the legal world: actual conversation. No scripts. No set-piece presentations. Just expert facilitation and a deliberately small group of senior practitioners from the UK, Switzerland, Jersey, Guernsey, the USA, Asia, and beyond, working through the real challenges facing the contentious trusts and private wealth sector today.
The intimacy is intentional. When you strip away the theatre of conventional legal conferences, something more useful tends to emerge — candid exchanges about cross-border trust disputes, the pressures bearing down on complex family wealth structures, and the early warning signs that trustees and their advisors too often miss until it is too late.
The Future of Contentious Trusts
On the final morning, Friday 24 April, our Alfred Ip co-lead Session Seven — titled The Future of Contentious Trusts — alongside Roxane Reiser of Wilberforce Chambers and Scott E. Rahn of RMO Lawyers.
Predicting where contentious trust litigation, high-net-worth dispute resolution, and international wealth management are heading requires more than extrapolating current trends. The landscape is shifting in ways that are genuinely difficult to map. Geopolitical instability is redrawing the assumptions that underpinned many offshore trust structures. Family dynamics are evolving — blended families, cross-jurisdictional relationships, and intergenerational wealth transfers are generating conflicts that traditional trust administration was simply not designed to handle. And regulatory scrutiny of high-net-worth individuals and their wealth preservation vehicles is intensifying across virtually every major jurisdiction.
What does this mean for trustees, trust litigators, and private wealth advisors in practice? That is the question we intend to dig into honestly, drawing on the collective experience in the room.
From our work at Hugill & Ip — where trust disputes, estate planning, and family law frequently intersect in ways that are distinctly shaped by the Asian context — we know that the pressures facing trustees today rarely arrive in neat, jurisdiction-specific packages. A contentious trust matter with roots in Hong Kong may have beneficiaries in Europe, assets in the Caribbean, and a governing law that nobody anticipated would be tested. The trustee of the future will need to be part diplomat, part legal strategist, and entirely clear-eyed about the risks building quietly inside structures that look, on paper, perfectly sound.
Rather than delivering predictions from a podium, the session was designed to be a genuine exchange. The goal was to leave the audience with sharper thinking and practical, actionable strategies — not a theoretical framework that dissolves the moment you return to your desk.
If you are managing complex trust structures, advising high-net-worth families on succession planning, or navigating cross-border trust litigation, the question of what comes next is not an abstract one. It is already arriving. Getting ahead of it requires the kind of proactive, experienced legal advice that only comes from practitioners who have seen how these disputes actually unfold — and who are willing to share what they have learned.
