Thank you to Jon Martinez for this week’s edition, which examines a leadership role that family enterprises may overlook: the chief governance officer.

Most family enterprise boards perform exactly the job they were designed to do.

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.