Legal Risk in Trust Drafting

Speaker: Professor Lionel Smith (McGill University and Kings College London)
Chair: Professor Charles Mitchell (UCL)
Admission: Free
Accreditation: This event is accredited with 1 CPD hour with the SRA (BSB pending)
Series: Current Legal Problems 2014-15

Trust drafting practises have changed dramatically in recent decades. Taxation and other considerations have led to an enormous increase in the dispositive discretions held by trustees. This style of trust drafting may create legal risks. These risks can arise in at least three ways: (1) the governing legal principles, as widely understood, may be subject to revision; (2) drafting techniques may be based on a misunderstanding of the law; (3) drafting techniques may invite litigation. This lecture will examine some of these possibilities using concrete examples.

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About the speaker

Lionel Smith is Sir William C. Macdonald Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, McGill University and Professor of Private Law, Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London. He is interested in all aspects of fundamental comparative private law. He is particularly engaged with how private law understands aspects of unselfish behaviour, and he has an active research agenda in the law relating to trusts, fiduciary obligations, gifts, and unjust enrichment. He is always interested in supervising postgraduate research in these fields.

He is the author of The Law of Tracing (Oxford University Press, 1997), and a co-author of Waters’ Law of Trusts in Canada, 4th ed. (Carswell, 2012). He is a co-author and the English reporter of Commercial Trusts in European Private Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005; paperback, 2009). He is a contributor to Canadian Corporate Law: Cases, Notes and Materials, 4th ed. (Butterworths, 2010), Oosterhoff on Trusts: Text, Commentary and Materials, 7th ed. (Carswell, 2009), and The Law of Restitution in Canada: Cases, Notes and Materials (Emond Montgomery, 2004). He edited three works on comparative trust law: The Worlds of the Trust (Cambridge University Press, 2013); La fiducie en droit civil (a special issue ((2013) 58:4) of the McGill Law Journal) and Re-imagining the Trust: Trusts in Civil Law (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He is also the author of numerous articles, book chapters, notes and reviews.

Lionel Smith is a member of the American Law Institute, the European Law Institute, the International Academy of Comparative Law and the International Academy of Estate and Trust Law. He is a non-practising member of the Bar of Alberta. In March 2014, the Arts Council of Canada announced that Lionel Smith had been awarded a Killam Fellowship.

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems annual lecture series was established over sixty years ago. The lectures are public, delivered on a weekly basis and chaired by members of the judiciary.

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) annual volume is published on behalf of UCL Laws by Oxford University Press, and features scholarly articles that offer a critical analysis of important current legal issues. It covers all areas of legal scholarship and features a wide range of methodological approaches to law. With its emphasis on contemporary developments, CLP is a major point of reference for legal scholarship.

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