Our pedigree in the innovative fusion of business, law and commerce stems back to 1884. In 1919, following the bleakness of the Influenza pandemic, Fairchild Greig & Co. helped families in post-World War Britain recover through trade and investments in the gold and diamond mining consortiums of South Africa. By the 1950s, the firm had built up a reputation as specialists in private wealth, augmented with corporate and finance expertise, when one of the partners at Clifford Turner, Henry Wells, left the firm and joined us to form Fairchild Greig & Wells.

“We’ve been fusing business, law and commerce for more than 130 years. Working collaboratively across our company of practice partners, we’ll innovate solutions to complex problems for 100’s more.”

Today, we carry the theme of collaborative innovation and duty of care into an overarching Quality Management System (QMS). Our QMS brings us closer to our immediate clients, their extended family and our practice partners to design and execute client projects collaboratively to deliver desired outcomes on time and within budget.

Why clients like working with us

We know that no matter how similar two cases may be, a solution that meets the needs of one may not necessarily meet the needs of another. So we remain versatile and consciously different in how we help clients. We feel the main differences include but aren’t limited to the following.

Depth of care

We care deeply. When we accept your instructions, we assume a duty of care that often exceeds the levels other firms are willing to undertake. In our experience, most firms limit themselves to merely adhering to regulatory obligations, placing their profitability above all else. This attitude is detrimental to achieving the client’s desired outcomes or the greater good.

To successfully meet the client’s desired outcome, we think about business, law and commercial considerations to design innovative projects motivated by doing what’s right, not what produces the most profits for us. For recent examples, please ask us about how our projects innovated a solution to prevent a young family from being made homeless; helped unite long-lost families from across the globe; ensured elderly and vulnerable clients receive professional and empathetic care for the remainder of their lives, to mention only a few.

Quality management

Our QMS includes a comprehensive “Fact File” that we innovated during the Covid pandemic to allow family members to safely work with each other and with us within a virtual environment. We have since found that the Fact File brings families closer together and can reduce costs if they continue to work with us as we administer the estate.

Project workspaces

As advocates of the modern workplace, we often provide clients, family members and practice partners with secure ‘guest’ access to our collaborative computing environment and online conferencing facility. This includes a dedicated digital workspace where they can interact with us across international time zones, from the comfort of their homes or office, or one of our many hybrid workplaces when in town.

The workspace includes access to document libraries, contacts lists and an interactive discussions tool to update each other and stay abreast of progress. For more complex cases, we also include a detailed, professionally prepared project plan that gives an end-to-end perspective of the work that needs to be done to achieve the desired outcome. The project plan is often divided into stages with tasks assigned to individuals and teams to work on which are tracked to show overall progress openly and transparently.

This gives everyone involved a sense of inclusion, a desire to contribute and confidence from knowing the project is on time and within budget, or conversely, the transparency to proactively mitigate any risks that it may not.

What we can help you with

We are often named on Wills as the professional Executor and Trustees of the testator’s estate or may work on behalf of the named Executors under a Power of Attorney appointing Fairchild Greig Will Trusts Ltd as the entity assuming the legal responsibility to administer the estate. Either way, Fairchild Greig & Co. estate administrators work to the exacting standards of our QMS to formulate project plans, not only for estate administration work but beyond. These may include, but are not limited to: –