Family enterprise disputes often combine legal and financial questions with deeply personal concerns involving fairness, identity, legacy, and belonging.

Inherited wealth can create extraordinary opportunity, but it can also raise difficult questions about identity, purpose, relationships, and belonging.

Family enterprise advisors regularly encounter legal issues that are easy to overlook because they are embedded in family relationships, informal practices, and expectations about the future.

In this week’s edition of FFI Practitioner, William Kambas of Withers and Amy Szostak of Northern Trust explore how estate-planning structures can help prepare rising-generation family members to understand, participate in, and eventually steward shared assets.

For family enterprise advisors, engaging passive shareholders is often framed as a governance challenge.

In this week’s Practitioner podcast, Martha Frick Symington Sanger, great-granddaughter of Henry Clay Frick, explores how family trauma can live on through stories, silences, and the objects passed from one generation to the next.

Choosing a family member to lead the enterprise is rarely a purely rational decision. Familiarity, lineage, seniority, and family expectations can easily overshadow the capabilities the business will need next.

How can the brain respond to something the conscious mind never perceived? And why does calming the amygdala not necessarily change the beliefs and behaviors connected to fear?

Drawing on survey findings and the experiences of hundreds of family enterprise advisors, Dennis Jaffe and Chris Graves examine the psychological, relational, and practical barriers that often stall transition planning.