Home / The Counsel / Eleanor Hartley
Senior Partner · Succession
Eleanor Hartley
A steady hand where legacy and privacy meet.
Eleanor leads the firm's private client practice, advising families, landowners and business founders on the careful passing-on of wealth. Clients return to her across a lifetime — and, often, across generations.
A quiet kind
of certainty.
Eleanor has spent twenty-five years on the private side of the law — the wills that are never contested, the estates that pass without a word in the press, the trusts that hold a family steady through change.
She read law at Durham and trained in the City before joining Robert Atkinson in 2003, taking silk in reputation if not in name: her opinions are sought by other firms as often as by clients. In 2015 she was appointed to lead the private client practice.
Her approach is unhurried and exact. She will tell you what she would do in your position, not merely what you are entitled to do — and she will remember, next year and the year after, exactly why.
Areas of Practice
What Eleanor leads
- iWills & SuccessionDrafting and structuring across jurisdictions
- iiFamily TrustsEstablishment, administration and reform
- iiiEstate & Tax PlanningInheritance tax, business relief, philanthropy
- ivProbate & Estate AdministrationComplex and cross-border estates
- vContentious ProbateWhere a family cannot agree
Selected Matters
Discreetly, and on the record.
Restructured a four-generation agricultural estate ahead of a change in relief, preserving the working farm intact for the next generation.
Advised the trustees of a substantial family settlement through a contested variation, resolved without proceedings and without publicity.
Administered a cross-border estate spanning three jurisdictions for the family of a former client, from first call to final distribution.
Established a charitable foundation for a business founder, structuring a lasting gift around the causes closest to the family.
Credentials
- Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England & Wales (1998)
- LL.B, University of Durham
- Full member, STEP (Society of Trust & Estate Practitioners)
- Ranked, The Legal 500 — Private Client
- Ranked, Chambers UK — High Net Worth
- Trustee, two private family foundations
“Eleanor treated a difficult year as if it were the only file she had. It was not — but it always felt that way.”— Client of eighteen years
In confidence
Instruct Eleanor.
Enquiries reach Eleanor directly, in complete confidence. Tell us the matter in a sentence to begin.