There is no single correct vehicle for a family office. The right one depends on how much weight the family places on control, succession, and tax, in that order or another, and most real structures end up combining more than one.
The four building blocks
Private Trust
Governed by the Indian Trusts Act, 1882. The natural choice when succession is the primary goal: assets and their eventual distribution are defined in the trust deed itself, largely outside the uncertainty of a will being contested. Weaker for a family that wants to actively trade or reinvest capital through the structure day to day.
LLP or Private Company
The natural choice when control and active investment matter most: a board or designated partners actively manage capital, enter into agreements, and hold operating or investment assets directly. Succession has to be engineered on top, through the constitutional documents and nomination structuring, rather than being native to the form.
Section 8 Company
The vehicle for the family's philanthropy, when giving is structured rather than ad hoc. Requires downstream registration (12AB and 80G, covered on the next page) to give donors tax benefit and the entity tax-exempt status on its charitable income.
A hybrid
Most family offices we've built aren't a single vehicle: an LLP or company for the investment and operating side, a trust for succession, and a Section 8 entity for philanthropy, each doing the one job it's actually good at.
What we help you decide
Which combination fits depends on questions only the family can answer: how much of the wealth is meant to be actively managed versus preserved and passed on, whether philanthropy is a real, ongoing commitment or occasional, and how many jurisdictions the family itself lives across. We score the options on control, succession, and tax together, not as three separate conversations, across India, the GCC, and the US.
Talk to us about your family office.
Bring the situation, however incomplete; leave with a written, fixed-fee plan for the structure, on the same calendar as everything else we file for you.