In September 2026, reports that hedge fund billionaire Chris Rokos was considering leaving London for Athens added another name to the growing list of wealthy individuals looking beyond Britain. Rokos, ranked by the Sunday Times as the country’s third-highest taxpayer, reportedly paid £330 million in tax last year. Weeks later, property billionaire David Reuben was said to have relocated to Monaco.
[See also: The Spear’s Tax and Trust Advisers Index]
For the lawyers featured in the Spear’s 2026 Tax Lawyers Index, the consequences extend well beyond a change of address. Those advising departing clients must navigate the complexities of severing UK tax residence while managing liabilities that can persist for years. Others are helping families who remain in Britain reconsider how businesses and property are structured and passed between generations.
With another Budget, delivered under Prime Minister Burnham’s stewardship, and further changes to the tax landscape possible, demand for their expertise shows little sign of abating.
Related
Explore the full 2026 Spear’s Tax & Trust Indices:
- Contentious Trust Lawyers
- Probate and Wills Lawyers
- Tax and Trust Barristers
- Accountants and Tax Advisers
- Trusts, Structuring and Offshore
Themes in 2026
Beating the clock
Inheritance tax, rather than income tax, has become the overriding concern for many wealthy families considering their future in Britain. Helen Clarke of Irwin Mitchell says her international clients can generally accept the taxes that Britain levies on their income and investments, but what worries them more is the prospect of their worldwide wealth falling within the UK inheritance tax net. For families who never intended to make Britain their permanent home, that is proving a step too far, prompting some to consider leaving before they become liable.
Liz Palmer of Howard Kennedy believes the government underestimated how the wealthy would respond. ‘The perception that they could make significant changes and only a modest number of people would change their behaviour or only a modest number would leave the UK, that was really quite a significant misconception.’
[See also: Who’s on the move? David Reuben joins UK billionaire exodus list]
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Similarly, Wilfrid Vernor-Miles of Hunters Law points out that many of his clients already own homes in several countries. Rather than uprooting their lives entirely, they are reducing the time they spend in Britain to manage their UK tax residence.
Others are choosing to simply keep their options open. Palmer has clients securing the right to live in a second country without any immediate intention of relocating. ‘They’re not necessarily going to live there, but have it so that they’ve got somewhere to go to if they need to change their plans,’ she explained.
The new map of wealth
For those who do leave, the choice of destination is also evolving. Dubai had been an obvious choice, but the Iran war reached the city in March, with drone strikes damaging its reputation for safety. Clarke had been advising several clients on relocating businesses and investments to the UAE before the conflict, but some, she says, are now spending time in Portugal or Italy while they reconsider where to settle.
Italy has emerged as a particular beneficiary, despite raising its annual flat tax on foreign income for wealthy new residents to €300,000. Alberto Brazzalotto of Maisto e Associati says his firm has handled more than a third of all requests to the Italian tax authority for formal confirmation of how prospective residents’ trusts and companies will be taxed. At Charles Russell Speechlys, Nicola Saccardo has expanded the firm’s Italian practice from two lawyers to more than 20 in four years, as Milan attracts a growing number of wealthy international residents.
The Americans are coming (cautiously)
If one demographic is still arriving in the UK, it is American. Alexis Hille of Farrer & Co sees US clients who do not necessarily want to become residents but want a foothold: a London property, or a place at a British school for their children. ‘Like a sort of safety net, I think they feel like,’ she said.
That traffic has reshaped practices built for a different market. ‘Historically I would have been considered a non-dom private client lawyer,’ said Matthew Radcliffe of Russell-Cooke. His clients now tend to have an American or Canadian nexus: ‘Brits moving to America, and Americans moving to the UK.’ Ben Rosen of Quastels has repositioned his practice towards US-connected clients, and around 40 per cent of Joshua Ryan’s work at Weightmans is US-connected. For Emma Gillies of Forsters, the figure is around 90 per cent.
Advisers featured in this year’s Tax Lawyers Index tell Spear’s that Americans are used to a far more generous estate tax exemption and to trusts as a routine lifetime tool. Gillies says the loss of excluded property trust planning under the new UK rules has come as an unwelcome surprise to clients who arrive with several trust structures already in place.
‘It’s so common to use them in the States for lifetime planning. And here it can be really tricky,’ said Hille. ‘So a lot of the advice is what not to do, or the advice is looking at what they’ve already done and trying to make it not so bad.’
The taxman’s new tools
While advisers plan, HMRC is looking harder. The authority reported that digital analytics and AI helped it bring in or protect around £10 billion in 2025-26, a year in which its compliance yield reached a record £50.2 billion. Pinsent Masons calculates that HMRC now recovers £35 for every pound it spends on investigations. This year it also wrote to billionaires with a UK tax footprint, asking about their finances.
‘There’s less tax advisory in the context of people coming to the UK, and there’s a lot of tax enquiry and tax investigation work,’ said Chris Moorcroft of Harbottle & Lewis. Adam Craggs of RPC called AI a potential ‘game changer’ for the Revenue, which can now analyse volumes of data it once lacked the staff to process. He has already acted for crypto entrepreneurs whose enquiries were triggered by information gathered from trading platforms, and he puts the typical investigation at three to five years, with some running to eight.
[See also: Do HMRC’s letters to billionaires spell the end of ‘complete privacy’?]
The stakes in those disputes can be very large. David Pickstone, who founded the tax disputes practice at Stewarts in 2014, has settled one strand of a dispute for the former owners of a consumer business who left the UK. The settlement means they will not pay the roughly £50 million HMRC originally sought on that aspect.
Meanwhile at Druces, Robert Macro’s team builds detailed source-of-wealth records for families whose historic links to certain industries or jurisdictions draw scrutiny from banks, reconstructing decades of financial history. One file ran to 55 boxes of records. ‘Like a biographer for a lot of clients now’ is how he described the role.
Simon Malkiel of Howard Kennedy gives clients straightforward advice. ‘If they ask the question about how HMRC find out, the advice is: assume they will find out, plan on that basis,’ he said. ‘Your digital footprint is more than a footprint. It’s a proper imprint.’
Click the links below to jump to a section of this article:
- Methodology
- The best tax lawyers: some names to know
- The best tax lawyers: the complete list
- Contact us
Methodology
Each year, the Spear’s Research Unit reassesses and refreshes its rankings of the leading providers in each sector by gathering data from and about the advisers and firms themselves, assessing submission forms, collating nominations, carrying out peer reviews, reviewing data from third-party sources, gathering references and recommendations, canvassing experts and conducting hundreds of interviews.
Advisers are evaluated using a proprietary scoring system that assigns different weightings to certain attributes. These scores feed directly into each new set of rankings in the Spear’s Indices. Each of these indices are published first online (according to the research calendar) and then in print. Print publication takes the form of the annual Spear’s 500 directory, which includes the top advisers in every index.
[See also: A guide to the Spear’s 500: Everything you need to know]
Each featured adviser is profiled on spears500.com. The site allows users to search the Spear’s database of more than 4,000 entities to find one (or more) to meet their specific requirements by filtering for specific attributes such as an adviser’s location, their specialist expertise and information about their client base.
The best tax lawyers: some names to know
Filippo Noseda
- Focus: International tax and estate planning
- Position: Partner
- Firm: Mishcon de Reya
Mishcon de Reya’s Filippo Noseda takes on ‘everything that you would expect from a private client lawyer’, advising clients on international tax law; family governance and succession planning; trust structuring; and philanthropic foundations. Noseda also does immigration planning for wealthy families, namely ‘people coming to the UK and leaving because of the non-dom changes’.
Noseda is a dual-qualified English and Swiss lawyer, and many of his clients are internationally minded. His fluency in multiple languages – English, Italian, German and French – allows him to smoothly coordinate cross-border matters.
Read Filippo Noseda’s full profile on Spears500.com
Robert Brodrick
- Focus: Succession, tax and estate planning
- Position: Partner
- Firm: Payne Hicks Beach
Robert Brodrick, partner and former chair of Payne Hicks Beach’s management board, relishes his role as a high-flying private client adviser, and is dedicated to advising clients on much more than their tax obligations.
‘The role has evolved over the last 20 years from being very much tax-focused in the late 1990s to being a mixture of tax and succession and family governance advice,’ he tells Spear’s.
Increasingly focused on cross-border work, particularly in the Middle East, Brodrick often travels to meet with families to discuss the creation and reorganisation of their trusts and UK property holding structures, or to advise his clients’ offshore trustees.
Read Robert Brodrick’s full profile on Spears500.com
Alexandra Hollingshead
- Focus: High-stakes cases
- Position: Partner
- Firm: Farrer & Co
At Farrer & Co, partner Alexandra Hollingshead works with trustees, UHNW beneficiaries, settlors and family business owners on complex trust structures ‘holding lots and lots of dynastic wealth’.
Since 2023, she has also led the firm’s pro bono and community work, building it from a near-standing start. Its flagship project gives end-of-life legal advice to young adults with terminal cancer. ‘The legal element is key, but really what we’re giving them is empowerment,’ she tells Spear’s.
Hollingshead, who was named Spear’s Tax Lawyer of the Year in 2025, refuses to treat the two sides of her practice differently. ‘I intentionally don’t switch my brain at all,’ she says. ‘The important thing with pro bono is that the work is done to the exact same standard, the exact same commitment and devotion.’
Read Alexandra Hollingshead’s full profile on Spears500.com
Nick Warr
- Focus: International clients
- Position: Senior partner
- Firm: Winston Taylor
Winston Taylor’s Nick Warr occupies a special niche: he is a lawyer who handles financial and succession planning for ‘a significant number of finance executives, hedge fund managers and private equity principals from top-tier organisations and funds’, with work valued in the ‘£500 million-plus’ range.
Given the nature of his client base, the majority of his cases involve two or more jurisdictions. One notable case involved a globally prominent family worth ‘in excess of £6 billion’ that instructed Warr and his team to act as the lead adviser on their personal and business affairs.
Read Nick Warr’s full profile on Spears500.com
Beatrice Puoti
- Focus: European tax and trust law
- Position: Partner and head of private wealth London
- Firm: Stephenson Harwood
Beatrice Puoti, a partner and head of private wealth in Stephenson Harwood’s London office, has a truly global practice: ‘I deal with everybody in the world,’ she tells Spear’s.
Advising individuals, family offices and international families on complex, cross-border tax, trust and estate planning, Puoti is also involved in trustee decision-making, family disputes and trust restructurings.
She is known as a go-to lawyer for HNWs with European interests – she speaks English, Italian, French and Spanish – and has Roman law and common law qualifications. ‘I understand both sides of the coin,’ she explains. ‘So I can put together something that is solid and tax-efficient, and will withstand scrutiny from either country.’
Read Beatrice Puoti’s full profile on Spears500.com
Russell Cohen
- Focus: Wealth structuring for international families
- Position: Head of international strategy
- Firm: Farrer & Co
Russell Cohen is head of international strategy at Farrer & Co, where he is responsible for helping HNW individuals and their families, trustees and family offices structure their wealth.
Cohen provides guidance on everything from wealth preservation and succession planning to tax planning and family governance. Much of his work has an international context, and he is an expert in tax planning for globally mobile individuals and non-UK trusts.
He is a founding member of STEP’s responsible stewardship of wealth thought leadership group, as well as a member of the editorial board for the International Family Offices Journal.
Read Russell Cohen’s full profile on Spears500.com
John Annetts
- Focus: Estate and succession planning
- Position: Head of wealth and succession
- Firm: Howard Kennedy
As head of private wealth at Howard Kennedy, John Annetts oversees a department spanning private client and family law, trust and estate disputes, high-value real estate and art law. As a chartered tax adviser, he also maintains a busy practice of his own, divided between complex estate administration and succession planning for entrepreneurs and senior executives.
His estate administration work often crosses borders. One matter involved a multi-jurisdictional, billion-pound estate, and tracing assets concealed during the deceased’s lifetime – ‘all very high value, very complex’, he tells Spear’s.
His planning work is equally substantial. He recently advised a group of executives whose individual fortunes were projected to exceed £250 million following a company transaction.
Read John Annetts’s full profile on Spears500.com
Laura Dadswell
- Focus: Family wealth stewardship
- Position: Partner
- Firm: Penningtons Manches Cooper
Laura Dadswell is a highly rated international tax and trust specialist at Penningtons Manches Cooper. Working in the firm’s private client team, she has particular expertise when it comes to US issues and corporate wealth structuring.
Dadswell has been described as one of the standout private client lawyers of her generation. She offers bespoke and sensitive solutions to help clients manage their family wealth.
She explains that when advising a client, she always attempts to put herself ‘in their shoes and imagine what I would make of what I’m telling them. That way, not only is my advice tailored to the client and their family, but it’s also digestible to non-lawyers.’
Read Laura Dadswell’s full profile on Spears500.com
David Pickstone
- Focus: Tax litigation
- Position: Head of tax disputes
- Firm: Stewarts
David Pickstone joined Stewarts in 2014 to establish and lead its tax disputes department; he has since acted on a number of large, high-profile cases.
For Pickstone, the focus is on finding ‘the right solution for the clients and having a strategic plan to get them from A to B in the best way possible’. Discretion and confidentiality are central to this approach, with clients – who include (U)HNW individuals, family offices, owner-managed businesses and corporates – often seeking his advice on how to avoid litigation and public proceedings.
He tells Spear’s that clients come to him for ‘strategic insight into resolving disputes without the need to go to litigation’, with he and his team focusing on the client’s wider objectives rather than simply pursuing tribunal success.
Read David Pickstone’s full profile on Spears500.com
The best tax lawyers: the complete list
Click on the individual names to be directed to more detailed profiles of each adviser on The Spear’s 500 website. The table is ordered by ranking and then alphabetically by surname.
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