For senior professionals whose own architecture is the last to which they have time to attend.
The work given to clients, applied at last to the family.
Among the families who arrive most frequently with sophisticated work overdue are the families of senior professionals themselves — tax partners at national accounting firms, estate counsel at established law firms, partners in audit, advisory, and corporate finance, principals at independent investment counsel firms. The architectural facility is, by trade, present. The architectural review of the practitioner’s own family is, almost without exception, two to ten years behind where it ought to be.
The pattern is recognisable. The professional’s income is uneven across the year — partner draws, profit shares, deferred compensation, performance fees that vest over a vesting schedule. Capital is held in the partnership’s capital account on the firm’s books, often illiquid until retirement, sometimes consequential at it. The estate plan was drafted before children, before partnership, before the spousal trust the practitioner now routinely recommends to clients. The insurance was purchased to fill a gap, not composed as infrastructure. The will refers to advisors no longer practising. None of it is a failure of capability; it is the consequence of a calendar that does not accommodate one’s own file.
Senatus serves as the architectural mandate for the family of the senior professional — convening the table the practitioner would have convened years ago, had the time existed. The work is done in concert with the practitioner’s own firm where possible, with the practitioner’s preferred external counsel where not, and at all times with the discretion the practitioner would extend to one of their own clients.
Four reviews the practice tends to defer indefinitely.
Each is the work the senior professional would unhesitatingly recommend to a client at the same stage. Each, attended to in time, materially shapes the family’s position on the day the partnership ends, the deferred compensation pays out, or the file passes to a successor.
Income, capital, and the rhythm of the partner draw.
Salary, partnership distribution, deferred compensation, vesting schedules, and the capital account on the firm’s books — treated as a single coherent income architecture rather than fiscal year by fiscal year. The Tax on Split Income provisions under s. 120.4 of the Income Tax Act, the personal-corporate boundary where a professional corporation is permitted, and the deferred-compensation timing all weighed against the family’s long-horizon position.
The estate plan, drafted in the year that follows partnership.
Wills, powers of attorney, the spousal trust, the testamentary trusts for the children, the cross-border wills set if the family has interests outside Canada. The work is rarely complex for a tax partner’s family; it is overdue. We coordinate with estate counsel of the practitioner’s choosing — their own firm where appropriate, an outside firm where independence is preferred — and hold the timeline so the work is sequenced, not deferred again.
Insurance and obligations, composed for the partner’s actual position.
Disability and critical illness coverage owned correctly, life coverage held against the deemed disposition under s. 70(5) of the Income Tax Act, partnership buy-out funded against the firm’s actual provisions, key-person where the practitioner’s book is structurally consequential. The architecture funds obligations at the moment they arise — not as a product placement, but as a deliberately composed component of the family’s balance sheet.
The transition out of partnership, sequenced years before required.
The retirement provisions in the partnership agreement, the capital account return schedule, the deferred-compensation runoff, the post-partnership consulting arrangement if any, the tax positioning of the years immediately before and after retirement, the eventual passage of the family’s book to the next generation. Composed with a horizon, every transition is clean rather than urgent.
The practitioner’s own file, composed with the discretion they extend to clients.
The engagement begins with a documented architectural review of the practitioner’s family position — the income architecture, the capital account, the existing estate plan, the insurance position, the deferred compensation schedule, the projected transition out of partnership. The review is held in confidence and circulated only to advisors the practitioner expressly nominates.
From that foundation, the relationship operates on the cadence the practice permits: an annual structural review at year-end, working sessions ahead of vesting events, partnership advancements, or material family decisions, and continuing coordination across the years that approach retirement.
“I had spent twenty-six years drafting these structures for clients. My own file was the one I had not opened. The engagement began with the architectural review I would have insisted upon for any client at my stage. What followed was simply the work I should have completed a decade earlier — done patiently, in confidence, and without my hours competing with it.”
If your own file is the one you have not opened, the next step is a private conversation.
Senatus accepts a limited number of new relationships each year, predominantly through private referral. A member of the Private Office will respond, in confidence, within twenty-four hours.
Request a Private ConversationTwelve adjacent audiences.
Most principals belong to more than one. The architecture is composed for the family in front of us; the descriptions below are how families most often arrive.