Marianne Kafena > Harbottle & Lewis LLP > London, England > Lawyer Profile

Marianne Kafena

020 7667 5000 marianne.kafena@harbottle.com View profile View profile

Work Department

Private Client

Position

Marianne is a leading tier one private client lawyer with more than 20 years’ experience advising families based mainly in the Middle East.

Marianne advises multinational families, their private offices and trustees on the range of legal and practical complexities that arise when personal, business and trust assets are shared by more than one generation.

Her advice ranges from establishing structures to hold and protect private family wealth, to supporting the work of family trustees and private offices. Marianne has practical experience of how banks and professional trustees operate: she was a professional trustee first within Lombard Odier private bank (in Bermuda working also in Geneva and London) and then at Kleinwort Benson, in London. This gives Marianne a particularly strong vantage point from which to ensure that the right people are running the appropriate structures in the way her clients expect.

One of the important aspects of Marianne’s work is ensuring that those involved in implementing a family’s plan maintain the enthusiasm and discipline required to see it through as practically and simply as possible, over time. Marianne grew up in Jordan, speaks Arabic and although many clients prefer to conduct their business in English, it is particularly important to her clients that she has the right cultural reflexes to calibrate the workings of non-Middle Eastern structures like trusts to each family’s particular needs within the Middle East.

Career

• Farrer & Co, Partner 2014 to 2020
• Harbottle & Lewis, Partner 2020 to present

Languages

• Arabic
• French

Memberships

STEP

Education

• King’s College London, English and French Law 1992- 1996
• University of Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne, French Law 1994 – 1995