Spilling The Beans: Information & Document Sharing With Beneficiaries

The subject of document and information sharing with beneficiaries can be fraught with risk for a trustee: disclosing too much and risk creating a rod for the trustee's own back, causing upset or breaching confidentiality on the one hand. On the other, risk disclosing too little, giving rise to tension in the trustee's relationship with its beneficiaries. Whether it is appropriate to disclose and how much to disclose in each situation requires careful analysis of the circumstances and scope of the request, as well as the legal principles. This is an area of the law dominated by rebuttable presumptions and there are few, if any, hard and fast rules.

In addition to the established trust law principles governing the sharing of documents and information with beneficiaries, a novel new front has opened on the battlefield – data protection.