How to Prevent Conflict, Navigate Succession and Resolve Disputes While Protecting Value

A practical guide for family business owners, founders, successors and the advisers who sit alongside them, written by a barrister and mediator who has grown up inside a family business and who now resolves family business disputes for a living.

Most family business disputes do not begin as legal problems. They begin as moments. A glance across a boardroom that lasts a beat too long. A decision taken without consulting someone who used to be consulted. A long-held assumption that the next generation will run the business, never properly tested. By the time the lawyers are involved, the moment is years in the past, and the dispute on paper is rarely about what the dispute is actually about.

Written by Robin Somerville, practising barrister, accredited commercial mediator, accredited workplace investigator and fee-paid judge, with extensive experience of shareholder, partnership and family business disputes.

About the Book

Family businesses account for a significant share of the UK economy. They employ a large share of working people, produce goods and services that often outlast the people who started them, and provide identity, purpose and security to the families inside them.

They also fail at rates that are not properly understood. Only thirty per cent of family businesses survive into the second generation, twelve per cent into the third, and three per cent into the fourth. What kills them is rarely a single dramatic event. It is more often a long-running failure to have the conversations that families do not want to have. Who will run the business after the founder. How dividends are shared. What “fair” means when one sibling is in the business and another is not. What happens to the shares if a marriage ends or a partner dies.

This book is, in part, an argument for having those conversations earlier. Not because earlier conversations always go well, but because conversations under pressure rarely do. The book sets out why family business disputes are different from any other commercial dispute, why they happen, what to do when they arrive, what the law can and cannot do about them, and how to come out of one with the business intact and, where possible, the family too.

The Whitcombe family case study runs through the book as a single evolving dispute. It is fictional but composed of real patterns the author has seen across many real cases. The book also draws on a counterpoint that the field too rarely examines: a family business that has done it well. F. Hinds has navigated six generations of family ownership without serious dispute, and the book explores what they have done and why it works.

About the Author

Robin Somerville grew up inside a family business. His own family ran a small business that, like many, was both the source of the family’s identity and the source of much of its tension. That early experience informs the practical, human-centred focus of this book. As a practising barrister, mediator, investigator and fee-paid judge, he now resolves the disputes that other families did not catch in time, and helps the ones that did catch them put structures in place to prevent the next one.

Who This Book Is For

This guide is written for:

• founders considering succession and worried about getting it right
• next-generation family members preparing to take on the business
• minority shareholders feeling squeezed out of a family business
• siblings managing the line between the family table and the boardroom
• non-family executives in family businesses, caught between competing loyalties
• spouses, partners and blended-family members whose interests intersect with the business
• solicitors and barristers advising family businesses
• mediators specialising in family business and shareholder disputes
• corporate finance advisers, accountants and tax advisers
• family office professionals
• governance and succession consultants

It is written to be readable by family members without legal training, but is rigorous enough to be useful to the lawyers, advisers and mediators who work alongside them.

What You Will Learn

The book explains:

• why family business disputes are different from any other commercial dispute
• the warning signs of conflict that founders and successors usually miss
• how ownership structures, dividend policies and remuneration become flashpoints
• how to handle the conversations about succession that families avoid
• what governance failures cause disputes and how to fix them before they cause damage
• how to recognise conflict escalation and stop it before the point of no return
• how to use mediation effectively in family disputes
• when litigation becomes inevitable and how to run it strategically
• the law of partnership disputes, shareholder disputes, derivative claims and just and equitable winding up
• the cognitive biases and emotional drivers that distort negotiation
• how to design resolution outcomes that hold and rebuild after a dispute
• the digital and social media risks that make disputes worse
• how AI is changing legal services and dispute preparation

Contents Overview

The book is structured in five parts that follow the arc of a family business dispute from the conditions that create it through to recovery and reference.

Part One: The Stakes and the Stories. Why family business disputes are personal in ways that other commercial disputes are not. Real case studies including the £5m third-generation family business that went insolvent in two years, the F. Hinds family who have navigated six generations without dispute, and the KTA Group / Hussain family who did not. Introduction to the Whitcombe family case study.

Part Two: Why Disputes Happen. Why family business conflict is different. Ownership, control and power. The triggers of dispute including succession, dividends, remuneration and innovation. Governance failures. Wealth, value and economic conflict. Succession as a source of dispute. Building structures that reduce dispute.

Part Three: When Conflict Arrives. Recognising and understanding conflict. The role of emotion and psychology in disputes. Negotiation principles for family business disputes. Digital and social media risks. Mediation and alternative dispute resolution.

Part Four: The Law and the Courts. Understanding your legal rights as a family business shareholder, director or partner. Partnership disputes. Shareholder disputes including unfair prejudice petitions under section 994 of the Companies Act 2006. Derivative claims on behalf of the company. Just and equitable winding up. The key cases including Ebrahimi v Westbourne Galleries, O’Neill v Phillips, In re Coroin and others. Working with lawyers, mediators and advisers. Funding a dispute.

Part Five: Resolution, Recovery and Reference. Designing outcomes that last. Rebuilding the family and the business after a dispute. The complete Whitcombe case study with worked-through application of the principles. Practical tools and frameworks for family business owners and advisers.

Why Family Business Disputes Need a Different Approach

Family business disputes are different because the family system and the business system operate by different rules. The family system runs on history, identity, fairness and unconditional belonging. The business system runs on capital, performance, governance and contracts. Disputes happen at the points where the two systems collide.

A standard commercial dispute can be solved by reference to the contract, the relevant law and the commercial logic. A family business dispute usually cannot, because the contract that matters most was never written down, the relevant law assumes a level of commercial rationality that is rarely present, and the commercial logic is competing with a family logic that runs deeper.

This book is written to help readers navigate both systems at once. It is rigorous about the law, because the law is what the courts will apply if the dispute gets there. It is also realistic about the family, because the family is what determines whether the dispute gets to court at all.

Purchase the Book

Price: £49.99

Buy Direct

Bulk purchase enquiries welcome for:

• law firms specialising in shareholder and partnership disputes
• corporate finance and tax advisers serving family businesses
• family offices
• universities and business schools teaching family business management
• family business associations and member networks
• mediation training providers

Family Business Dispute Services

Robin Somerville accepts instructions in family business disputes as a mediator (helping families resolve disputes without litigation), as a barrister (advising and representing family members in unfair prejudice petitions, partnership disputes and derivative claims), and as a fee-paid judge in equivalent matters in his judicial capacity.

For enquiries, see the commercial mediator service page, the shareholder disputes knowledge guide, the family business disputes knowledge guide, or request a tailored quote.

Related Books and Training

• Shareholder Disputes: the companion volume covering the law of shareholder and unfair prejudice disputes in depth
• Winning in Commercial Mediation: the practitioner’s guide to commercial mediation
• Winning in the Witness Box: for family business cases that reach trial