Louisa is a senior associate in the private client and tax team.
Louisa advises domiciled and non-domiciled high net worth individuals and international families on UK tax issues and cross border planning. She assists with the creation of trusts and provides UK tax advice for the trustees and beneficiaries of onshore and offshore trusts. She also provides advice to individuals and intermediaries on the Common Reporting Standard and other regulatory matters.
She joined our London office in 2001 as a trainee and qualified into the firm's private client department in 2003. She moved to Geneva when we opened our first Swiss office in 2005.
Me in a minute
I was attracted by the intellectual rigour of being a lawyer
I graduated with a degree in English Literature and had a brief foray with the publishing world before joining Withers, so a career as a solicitor wasn’t obviously on the cards. But I was attracted by the intellectual rigour of being a lawyer, nowhere more demanding than in unravelling the complexities of tax law. It is this challenge combined with the close personal interaction with clients and their advisers that I love about my job.
Although it sounds like a cliché, every day in the office presents a new question and a constant variety of tasks. One minute advising trustees and their litigators in relation to an application to remove a protector, the next restructuring multiple trusts for a family based in Latin America or drafting a complex will for a British national resident in Switzerland.
And meanwhile the industry landscape is always changing. My time in the Geneva office has seen dramatic changes, with the end of banking secrecy in Switzerland, the introduction of the Swiss-UK Agreement, the Liechtenstein Disclosure Facility, FATCA and more recently the Common Reporting Standard and the changes to the UK non-domicile regime. With this and more to come there is sure never to be a dull moment…