Trust Proliferation: A View from the Field

This Article reports the results of a broad empirical inquiry into modern trust practice, including a survey of 409 trust service providers in 82 jurisdictions - the largest, most diverse respondent group ever obtained in survey research targeting trust service providers - and interviews with 28 additional providers in five jurisdictions: the UK, US, Italy, Switzerland and Israel. I found that offshore legal systems are chosen to govern trusts based, first, on their usefulness for tax minimization, and second, on their incorporation of advanced trust features, many of which block creditor access to the trust assets. Forum choice clauses are also sometimes used to avoid norms applicable to trust users, such as tax demands and creditors' rights. Trust instrument clauses curtailing beneficiaries' rights to information appear in about a quarter of donative trusts.