A description of the PLC Private Client service. Click here or call 020 7202 1220 to register your interest in a free trial.
PLC Private Client is an online professional support service for the busy private client practitioner. The service has a range of benefits for private client practitioners:
Keeps them up to date with new developments.
Provides them with a level of support (through a bank of updates, practice notes, standard documents and checklists) that was previously available only to a few large firms through professional support lawyers (experienced lawyers who are no longer fee-earning).
Allows firms with PSLs and those without to concentrate their internal resources where the greatest return lies.
The service is largely written by the PLC Private Client professional support team (www.practicallaw.com/6-383-4118), four experienced editors with extensive experience in all aspects of private client work. Our resources are supplemented by materials written by experts at leading firms, which are then kept up-to-date by the professional support team.
PLC Private Client will include the following key areas:
Lifetime planning:
Inheritance tax planning.
Estate and succession planning on marriage and divorce.
Care fees.
Owner-managed businesses.
Capital gains tax for individuals.
Wills
Making wills.
Formalities.
Trusts
Setting up and administering trusts.
Offshore trusts.
Taxation.
Trust disputes.
Mental capacity
Assessing mental capacity.
Planning for incapacity.
During incapacity.
International individuals
Residence and domicile.
Coming to and leaving the UK.
Holiday homes abroad.
After death
Probate, intestacy and administering of estates.
Variations and disclaimers.
Contentious estates.
Inheritance Act claims.
Charities
Charitable giving.
Setting up charities.
Running a charity.
Charity litigation.
General
General contract and boilerplate.
Legal concepts.
Full PLC Topic index.
PLC Private Client is aimed at:
Lawyers: be they specialist private client lawyers or other lawyers who need to know about private client matters.
In-house counsel.
Private client and personal tax practitioners outside the legal profession who need to understand and stay up-to-date with private client law and practice, such as:
Accountants and advisors at trust companies;
Private banks; and
Family offices.
Firms large and small enjoy the host of benefits offered by PLC Private Client:
Confidence that you are up-to-date in your area of practice.
More time to spend on your clients, instead of information gathering.
The ability to get your team up-to-speed on key developments quickly and efficiently.
Reduced risk of errors. Everyone in your team will have reliable resources at their fingertips.
Improved know-how in areas where you have less practical experience.
Increased focus on firm and client-specific know-how and finding innovative solutions to new transaction problems, instead of routine information gathering.
PLC Private Client provides the following resources and materials:
Practice notes: a comprehensive bank of continually updated information.
Standard documents, letters, briefing notes and drafting notes: continually updated as developments occur.
Practical legal updates: delivered to subscribers by e-mail and published on our website.
Checklists.
Articles from PLC Magazine.
Multi-jurisdictional guides.
PLC Which Lawyer?.
"Ask the Team": subscribers can pose technical questions for the team. Answers are published on our website along with links highlighting pertinent PLC resources.
FAQs.
These are explained below.
Practice notes are detailed, practical explanations of particular topics of law and practice. For experienced private client advisers, they provide up-to-date and reliable statements of law and practice. Junior practitioners use them to gain an understanding of relevant areas not yet acquired through practice. The notes may also be used as the basis for in-house training sessions.
Practice notes are kept up-to-date by our specialist and experienced professional support team (www.practicallaw.com/6-383-4118) whenever the relevant law and practice changes.
PLC Private Client provides an online library of standard documents, letters and briefing notes. All of these documents and clauses are accompanied by drafting notes, which give detailed guidance on the relevant legal and drafting issues and help you to adapt the document to your own or your client's specific requirements.
Standard documents, letters, briefing notes and drafting notes are updated by the PLC Private Client team to reflect the most relevant developments in practice. They form an easily searchable bank of information and are available both online and in Microsoft Word 6.0 format (see How do I use the PLC Word template (www.practicallaw.com/0-101-3271)). For details on converting PLC standard documents into your firm's own house style, see PLC FirmStyle (www.practicallaw.com/2-102-5937). For a full list of all standard documents, clauses and drafting notes currently available on the PLC Private Client service, see Standard documents and drafting notes (www.practicallaw.com/6-383-4123).
The updates cover:
Significant new cases.
Proposed, draft and new UK and EC legislation and regulations.
HMRC updates and press releases.
Consultation papers and commentary from the UK government, the EC and relevant professional bodies.
Changes in market practice.
They are written by the PLC Private Client professional support team (www.practicallaw.com/6-383-4118), who monitor and review all relevant sources daily for material of significance to our subscribers. Unlike other legal information services, PLC Private Client does not simply pass on raw information: we focus on the needs of our subscribers by only reporting on developments of practical significance to them.
Our updates include:
A summary.
Relevant background information.
An analysis of the practical impact of the development.
Each update is complete in itself, but also includes hypertext links to source materials (including transcripts for new cases), other updates and practice notes where appropriate.
You will be able to choose to receive updates by either weekly or monthly e-mail. The most recent items will also feature on the PLC Private Client homepage. Past updates are accessible from a fully searchable archive. Updates can be integrated with subscribers' internal briefings and marketing materials.
Checklists are user-friendly and practical step-by-step guides to Private Client issues. They act as an introduction or aide-mémoire to ensure that important points of law and practice are covered. They can easily be converted into training materials.
As with practice notes, standard documents, standard clauses and drafting notes, checklists are updated by the PLC Private Client team whenever necessary to reflect relevant developments and changes in practice. For a full list of all checklists, see Checklists and flowcharts (www.practicallaw.com/2-383-4139).
The service provides access to private client related content in PLC Magazine. Feature articles can be read on-screen in simple text or PDF format, complete with graphics.
Subscribers gain access to the PLC multi-jurisdictional country Q&A guides on aspects of private client law in Europe and worldwide.
PLC Which Lawyer? and more specifically PLC Which Lawyer? Private Client (www.practicallaw.com/5-500-5801), contain details of recommended firms and lawyers in 46 countries with the latter focusing on specialist private client practitioners and practices.
Each month, the team provides guidance on a question of practical or topical interest, highlighting related content on PLC Private Client. Rather than shying away from complex areas of law, the "Ask the Team" feature aims to tackle some of the most troublesome questions and present answers with clarity and precision.
The "Ask the Team" resource is circulated in the e-mail update. Each edition can also be found under the archive tab for the relevant topic area or areas covered by the particular question.
Questions are selected by the team and can be submitted by e-mail at privateclientfeedback@practicallaw.com. Our normal Terms of Use (www.practicallaw.com/2-102-1331) apply.
PLC Private Client FAQs (www.practicallaw.com/4-383-5331), are a collection of short notes dealing with key issues and questions that arise in the area of private client law.
Practical Law Company has developed an application which delivers PLC standard documents in Microsoft Word in your house style, including your logo and preferred font and numbering. This removes the time-consuming chore of reformatting documents and improves document turnaround time. For more information, see PLC Firmstyle.
From December 2008, PLC Private Client will also feature an automated will-generator using PLC FastDraft technology. By sharing common information intelligently between documents, you can produce advance first drafts of a full set of related documents in half the usual time.
The PLC Glossary has plain language definitions of key legal and technical terms used in private client law.
As well as containing private client terms, it is an archive of business legal know-how developed since PLC's inception 18 years ago. Terms particularly pertinent to private client law are highlighted under each relevant topic section.
The service is delivered through a website using advanced technology specifically developed by Practical Law Company to provide a seamless source of managed know-how to the practitioner in an easy-to-access form. Its features include:
Searching. All text is fully searchable. Searches can be refined by the type of material (for example, standard documents only) or a specified time period.
Index. You can browse topic areas and access information via the PLC Private Client homepage.
Links. Frequent hypertext links will take you directly to additional information in other areas of PLC and to external sources, if required.
Integration. You can integrate your own know-how closely with that of the service while maintaining confidentiality. For further information, please contact your account manager, or call the PLC helpline (www.practicallaw.com/7-102-1343).
The Practical Law Company professional support team comprises over 90 experienced former practitioners covering a wide range of law. Their input helps maintain high standards of accuracy on points of law and practice and enables the PLC Private Client team to stay up-to-date with current market practice. To view the team members' profiles, see PLC professional support team.
The service has a consultation board of leading experts. They advise on the direction of the service and their input helps maintain high standards of accuracy on points of law and practice. To view members of the consultation board, see Consultation board (www.practicallaw.com/2-383-4120).
Serle Court, a leading private client chambers, will be working in partnership with PLC Private Client as contributing editors. Seventeen members of chambers will be contributing materials to the service. See Serle Court contributing editors (www.practicallaw.com/8-383-8097), for full details.
PLC Private Client is a developing service and so resources and materials will be added as the service continues to adapt to subscribers' needs.
PLC Private Client will keep under review the range of topics it covers and the type of resources and materials it provides.
For a list of the various materials we propose to add to PLC Private Client in the forthcoming year, see PLC Private Client: Provisional publishing schedule (www.practicallaw.com/8-383-4141).
If you have any suggestions on the service, please e-mail the PLC Private Client team at privateclientfeedback@practicallaw.com.
For further information, please contact our sales department on the Practical Law Company Helpline.
