Every family office that has been trading for more than a few years has a story about a referral that went wrong. The specialist was competent, the work was done, and eighteen months later the client was taking calls directly from the specialist about matters that had nothing to do with the original brief. Nobody breached anything. The boundary simply was never written down, and in the absence of a boundary the relationship drifted towards whoever was in the room most often.
That experience is why introductions from family offices to technical firms are slower and more guarded than the underlying economics would suggest. The question being asked is never whether the specialist can do the work. It is what happens to the relationship afterwards. It deserves a direct answer rather than reassurance, so what follows is how the two working models are actually set up, what is agreed in writing before anything starts, and where the line sits when the client asks a question that falls on the wrong side of it.
Two ways in, and they are not the same
A referral is the simpler of the two. The family office introduces the client, Montclare is engaged directly by the client for a defined piece of European structuring, and the family office remains the client’s principal adviser throughout. The engagement has its own scope and its own end. When the structuring is complete, the file closes.
A joint mandate is different in kind, not in size. Here both firms are engaged on the same matter at the same time, with the family office holding the relationship and the commercial judgment and Montclare holding the Dutch and European execution. The two run in parallel rather than in sequence, and the client sees a single piece of work rather than a handover. Joint mandates suit matters where the structural question and the investment question cannot be separated, which in practice means most acquisitions.
The choice between them is usually decided by whether the family office wants to remain inside the technical conversation or wants it taken off its desk entirely. Both are legitimate. What is not workable is starting as one and behaving as the other, which is how most referral disputes begin.
Responsibilities agreed in writing before anything starts
Whichever model applies, the responsibilities are agreed in writing before work begins. Not a mutual non disclosure agreement and a handshake, and not an engagement letter drafted after the first meeting with the client. The document that matters is the one that says who does what, who says it to the client, who invoices, and what happens at the end.
The content is unglamorous and short. Scope of the Montclare work and its explicit outer edge. Which firm is the client’s point of contact for which category of question. How fees are structured and who raises them. What happens to information each firm receives about the client’s affairs outside the mandate. And the duration of any restriction on approaching the client directly once the file closes.
Writing this down before the introduction costs an afternoon. Reconstructing it afterwards, once two firms have different memories of the same conversation, costs the relationship. Firms that resist putting it on paper are usually resisting the specific clause they would rather leave ambiguous, and it is worth finding out which one.
Neither of us duplicates the other
The principle underneath both models is that neither firm duplicates the other. The family office holds the relationship: it knows the family, the history, the objectives that are never written in a brief, and the internal politics that decide whether a structure will actually be used once it is built. Montclare holds the Dutch and European execution: holding design, treaty positioning, substance and governance, the notarial and corporate steps, and the exit route.
Those are genuinely different competences and they are not interchangeable. A structuring firm that starts advising on family dynamics is out of its depth. A family office that starts drafting the treaty analysis is exposed in a way it may not discover for years. Keeping each side inside its own competence is not diplomacy, it is risk management for both firms.
The practical test is simple. If both firms would give the same answer to a question, one of them is doing unnecessary work. If neither would, the mandate has a gap in it and somebody needs to be appointed.
Where the existing adviser stays in place
Most clients arriving through a family office already have advisers. A corporate lawyer, an accountant, a tax adviser in the home jurisdiction, often a private bank with its own views. The instinct of a new firm entering that picture is to review everything, which is expensive, slow and read by the incumbents as an attempt to displace them.
The European leg is added alongside those advisers rather than over them. The home jurisdiction adviser keeps the home jurisdiction. The corporate lawyer keeps the operating company. What is added is the layer that none of them can properly cover from where they sit, which is the Dutch entity, the treaty position between the jurisdictions, the substance and governance that makes the entity credible, and the exit mechanics.
Where the existing advice does have to be revisited, it is because a cross border step makes it wrong, not because it was written by someone else. That is said to the client and to the adviser, in that order, with the reason attached. An adviser who is told why tends to cooperate. One who discovers it through the client does not.
Who speaks to the client, and about what
In a referral, Montclare speaks to the client about the structuring work and nothing else. Questions outside that scope go back to the family office, including the ones that would be easy to answer. This is deliberate: the cost of answering a question outside scope is not the answer, it is the precedent that the client can bring anything to whoever picks up first.
In a joint mandate, the communication is usually direct on technical matters and joint on anything that affects the shape of the transaction. Written work product is shared with both, at the same time, without one firm receiving a version first. Clients notice when two advisers are visibly synchronised, and they notice the opposite faster.
Where a client raises something that belongs to the family office, the correct response is to say so and route it back, not to note it and mention it later. Discretion between firms is part of the same discipline as confidentiality towards outsiders.
The commercial terms, said out loud
Fee arrangements are the part of an introduction that both sides prefer to leave until later, and leaving it until later is what turns a working relationship into a negotiation at the worst possible moment. It is settled at the same time as the scope, in the same document.
The structures in use are few. The client engages Montclare directly and pays for the structuring work, with the family office continuing to charge the client on its own basis for its own role. Or both firms invoice separately within a joint mandate, each for its own scope, so the client can see what each is paying for. Or, where the family office prefers to present a single relationship to its client, it engages Montclare itself and Montclare invoices the family office. All three are workable. What matters is that the client is never billed twice for the same work by two firms who each believe they were the one doing it.
The fee itself is set per mandate rather than by a rate card applied to whatever arrives. A structuring file with three jurisdictions and an existing entity to unwind is not the same file as a clean incorporation with a single treaty question, and quoting them the same way misprices one of them. Where the shape of the work cannot be seen at the outset, that is said, with a scoping step priced separately, rather than a figure produced to close the conversation.
When a referral is the wrong answer
Not every file should be introduced. Where the underlying position does not need a European leg, adding one manufactures work and the client will eventually work that out. Where the client’s real problem is that the existing structure was built badly and nobody wants to say so, an introduction becomes a way of outsourcing an uncomfortable conversation, and it rarely survives contact with the facts.
There is also the matter of capacity. Montclare is a boutique by design, built on quality over quantity, under a premise of confidentiality and discretion: a small number of mandates, each with genuine attention, rather than volume. That means declining files that would fit the perimeter but not the calendar. It is better said at the introduction than discovered in month three by a family office whose client is waiting.
The mandates that fit best are recognisable in advance: clients seeking European market entry, real estate, financing, a Dutch holding layer above an existing structure, succession or asset protection planning that needs a European leg, or the Canary Islands regime as a low tax entry point backed by genuine substance rather than a shell.
Why the boundary is the offer
A family office is not buying technical capability when it makes an introduction. Technical capability is available in every jurisdiction and can be assessed in one meeting. What it is buying is the confidence that in two years the client will still be its client, and that the specialist will have stayed inside the perimeter without needing to be reminded.
That confidence is not created by assurances at the outset. It is created by a written division of responsibilities, by declining the questions that fall outside it, and by a pattern of behaviour across several files. The first introduction from a family office is always a test, and it is understood as one. Treating it that way, rather than as the beginning of a client relationship, is the only thing that produces a second.
This article is informational. It does not constitute investment advice, an offer, or an invitation to invest, and it is not a financial promotion. Regulated activities are carried out only by appropriately licensed parties.