Legal Week Trust and Estates Litigation Forum 2012

Legal Week's fifth annual Trust and Estates Litigation Forum will unite the world's elite in the field of trust and estate litigation to share, compare and contrast ideas and strategies for the year ahead and beyond. Experts will pool their experience of both familiar and less familiar jurisdictions in a unique and informal collegiate atmosphere in which the contributions of both speakers and delegates are welcomed and valued. The secret of the Forum's success, developed over the past 5 years, lies in the quality of the speakers and delegates it attracts from many of the key jurisdictions in the world and their willingness to participate actively in the programme.

As always, there is much for us to debate and discuss in the light of topical developments and the increasingly rich bank of knowledge and experience which trust litigators have acquired. The specialism has grown from adolescence to maturity and the annual opportunity to reflect together on what we do and the way we do it is especially valuable. Over the past year the courts in England and in many other trust jurisdictions have had cause to re-consider the limits of the rule in Hastings Bass.

There has also been some useful judicial exploration of the court's statutory jurisdiction to confer powers on Trustees where expedient to do so in relation to the management and administration of trusts. This has been in a year during which many of us spent a great deal of our time advising on the restructuring of discretionary family trusts as a result of important tax, investment or other objectives. Those are only two of the many issues which we will examine over the course of the Forum's three days in the magnificent setting of the Four Seasons Provence.

This year we are especially pleased that our jurisdictional reach will extend to the United States and other key jurisdictions, including the Middle East and Hong Kong. This will allow us to explore the extent to whic