FOR PROFESSIONAL ADVISORS

A specialist layer, in service of the professionals whose clients we serve alongside.

Most families who come to Senatus arrive through the professionals already counselling them.

Tax partners, estate counsel, M&A lawyers, senior accountants. When the complexity of a family’s affairs exceeds what any one discipline can hold in isolation, coordination becomes the work. Our role is to hold that coordination on your behalf — never to displace the relationships you have built, always to extend them.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Four commitments, held without exception.

Four commitments govern the relationship from the first conversation forward. They are not courtesies. They are the terms on which integrated counsel endures for a decade and beyond.

I
We do not displace the incumbent.
The lawyer, accountant, or advisor who brings the family remains the family’s counsel within their discipline. Our mandate is coordination, not substitution.
II
We do not solicit.
Work that belongs within the referrer’s practice stays within the referrer’s practice, and is not redirected to specialists in our network without the referrer’s knowledge.
III
We co-author where useful.
Joint memoranda, joint meetings, and jointly authored planning documents are the norm rather than the exception. The referring firm is visible in the work product where its counsel shaped the outcome.
IV
We disclose compensation.
The family sees, in writing, what each party is paid and by whom, before any decision is made. Senatus pays and accepts no referral compensation from the professionals within its network.
HOW WE WORK WITH REFERRING FIRMS

The engagement, in three stages.

Referring professionals retain direct access to senior Senatus counsel throughout. The cadence is written into the mandate from the first meeting and observed thereafter.

STAGE I · THE INITIAL CONSULTATION
Attended jointly by the family, the referring advisor, and a senior Senatus principal.
The scope of coordination and the boundaries of each party’s mandate are established in the first conversation, in the family’s presence. No work proceeds until the shape of the relationship is clear.
STAGE II · ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW
Delivered over six to twelve weeks, in draft, to every advisor at the table.
A written structural map of the family’s current position and the proposed adjustments, circulated to all advisors for review before any action is taken. The referring firm’s voice is incorporated throughout, not consulted at the end.
STAGE III · CONTINUING RELATIONSHIP
Governed by a written mandate on a scheduled cadence.
Formal joint reviews, typically quarterly, and ad-hoc coordination as circumstances require. The referring firm remains in continuous dialogue with senior Senatus counsel for the life of the engagement.
WHERE THE FIT IS STRONG

Five inflection points.

The coordination model is most useful to referring professionals whose clients sit at one of five moments. Outside them, most families are well served by the counsel they already have.

I
Specialist Scoping
The moment the family’s affairs exceed what a single practice is positioned to coordinate — and a specialist layer is required to hold the architecture while each discipline continues to do its work.
II
Liquidity Event
The approach, execution, or aftermath of a sale, recapitalization, or other material liquidity event, where timing and sequencing materially shape the after-tax outcome.
III
Multi-Entity Consolidation
Consolidation of a multi-entity holding structure across two or more generations of operating business, where alignment of tax, governance, and succession is overdue.
IV
Cross-Border Complexity
Introduction of cross-border complexity — most frequently substantial U.S. residency, property, or operating exposure held within a Canadian family.
V
Next-Generation Preparation
Preparation of the next generation for ownership, control, or stewardship of capital they did not build — governance authored before inheritance.
THE SPECIALIST LAYER

A view of the whole, brought in service of your counsel.

Senatus operates as a specialist layer above the disciplines — the advisor who sees the family’s affairs as a single system, and holds the map every other professional contributes to. The intent is to strengthen your counsel, not to replace it.

The finest CPAs, lawyers, and investment counsel are deep in their own discipline by construction. The architectural view — the interdependencies between tax, estate, corporate, insurance, and succession — is rarely absent for lack of capability; it is absent because no single practice is positioned to hold it. We hold that map, make it legible, and bring it back to the referring firm so that the work each professional performs lands against a coordinated whole.

Referring firms tell us the same thing, often after the second engagement: the family reads their work as sharper, the partner conversations become easier, and the family’s gratitude is extended to the firm that brought them to the table. That is the intended outcome, and it is by design.

I
We surface the work. We do not claim it.
An architectural review often reveals disciplined work for the family’s CPA, tax counsel, or corporate lawyer to perform. Those engagements sit with the referring firm. We make the case, in writing, for why the work matters and how it fits the family’s architecture.
II
We keep the referring firm in the foreground.
Co-authored memoranda, joint planning documents, and family-facing presentations name the referring firm throughout. The family sees the referring professional as the architect of the outcome. Senatus sits beside the firm and its client, not between them.
III
We hold the map your practice does not have the hours to draw.
A practicing tax partner has forty clients. A practicing M&A lawyer has six live files. The architectural diligence a sophisticated family warrants rarely fits within either practice on its own. We perform that diligence, and hand it to the professionals it informs.
THE POSTURE
We step forward when the file asks for the specialist layer. We step back when it does not. The measure of our involvement is what strengthens your counsel — not what extends our own.
IN PRACTICE

Three representative engagements. All credited where credit belongs.

In each, Senatus held the coordination mandate and surfaced substantive work — performed by, billed by, and credited to the referring firm. Identifying details have been altered; structural particulars are accurate in kind.

WORK RETURNED · TO THE REFERRING CPA
An $85M founding family, three holdcos, and a CDA that had been quietly compounding.
The family’s CPA of fifteen years had filed every return on time and advised capably within her mandate. The architectural review surfaced an unattended Capital Dividend Account balance of approximately $6.2M, a mispositioned insurance policy held personally rather than corporately, and a dividend strategy across the three holdcos that had drifted out of alignment with the family’s cross-border exposure. None of these were errors; they were artifacts of a practice that had grown incrementally without a single architectural review.
Returned to the referring firmA multi-year tax re-planning engagement for the CPA, a written dividend policy authored jointly, and a capital dividend extraction sequence executed over three fiscal years. The family’s thanks went to the CPA who had brought them to the table.
WORK RETURNED · TO THE REFERRING LAWYER
An estate plan drafted in 2011, and a family that had quadrupled in complexity since.
The referring estate partner had executed the original wills and a family trust over a decade earlier. In the interval, a U.S.-resident daughter had married, a third-generation grandchild had arrived, and a secondary operating business had been acquired. The twenty-one-year trust anniversary sat six years away. The architectural review produced a written instruction memorandum — reviewed with the partner before the family meeting — identifying will updates, powers of attorney restatement, a cross-border wills set, and a structural response to the trust anniversary that required counsel to draft.
The lift to the referring firmSix discrete legal engagements, sequenced over the following year, all drafted by the original estate partner with Senatus providing the architectural rationale and cross-border coordination. The firm’s relationship with the family deepened materially.
MANDATE SURFACED · FOR M&A COUNSEL
A founder three years early on a sale conversation, and the transaction he was about to accept.
The family had received an unsolicited approach from a strategic buyer at what appeared to be an attractive multiple. The architectural review identified three structural gaps: an unused lifetime capital gains exemption across the founder and his spouse, a purification that would materially change the after-tax proceeds, and an estate freeze that, if executed before the transaction, would shift future growth outside the founder’s estate entirely. The family asked us to introduce them to transactional counsel; we introduced the referring M&A partner, who had been outside the original conversation.
The lift to the referring firmA transactional mandate the firm would not otherwise have seen, with eighteen months of pre-transaction structural work that produced a measurably better after-tax outcome. The family extended the M&A partner direct access for the next liquidity event a decade hence.
PUBLISHED WITH SENIOR COUNSEL

Co-authored, where the subject and the readership warrant it.

Selected Perspectives pieces are co-authored with senior partners in tax, estates, and corporate law — published under joint byline, linked to the authoring firms where applicable. Referring advisors are invited to propose subjects on which a co-authored piece would serve both readerships.

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ADVISOR CHANNEL

A direct line, handled personally.

Write to the Advisor Channel with a brief note on the client circumstance and the nature of the contemplated coordination. A Senatus principal will respond, in confidence, within one business day.

Write to the Advisor Channel
or, directly: advisors@senatuswealth.com