About Kallan Lawyers

Kallan Lawyers is a Melbourne law firm acting for business owners, families with structured wealth, trustees, directors and investors, and for the accountants and financial advisers who look after them.

We practise in trust law, tax, estate planning and succession, commercial law, superannuation, and construction and property. Those are not six unrelated departments. They are the areas a client with a business and a family structure actually needs, and they are constantly entangled: a trust deed determines an estate plan, a loan account determines a business sale, a tax position determines which entity should sign.

Three decades, three professions

The firm is built on three careers rather than one, and they were worked in sequence rather than studied.

Fifteen of those years were spent as an accountant and a CPA running an accounting practice, where tax structures, trust distributions and Division 7A were the daily work rather than textbook topics. Sixteen were spent as a registered builder, delivering more than 150 homes and multiple commercial buildings. The practice today is a law practice, and both backgrounds are brought to it.

What the combination is for

A great deal of professional advice fails at the seam between disciplines. The lawyer drafts a document that produces an unintended tax result. The accountant proposes a step the trust deed does not permit. Each is competent; neither is looking at the whole problem.

Having practised on both sides, Haas Kaplan reads the deed and the tax position together, and will say what a proposed step actually costs before it is documented rather than afterwards.

We can read the document and the numbers. Most of the value we add sits exactly where those two things meet.

Who we act for

• business owners and family businesses, including their companies, trusts and partnerships
• families with structured or significant wealth, and the next generation who will inherit it
• trustees, appointors, directors and shareholders
• self managed superannuation fund trustees
• property investors, developers, builders and landlords
• private lenders and borrowers
• accountants and financial advisers, acting for their clients

Working with accountants and advisers

A large share of our work is referred by accountants and financial advisers, and the arrangement that works is the straightforward one. They keep the client relationship and the compliance work. We give the legal advice and prepare the documents. We are not looking to take over the relationship, and where a step has a tax consequence the accountant will have to live with, we would rather discuss it with them first.

Construction: an additional capability

The builder's background makes construction and property a genuine part of the practice. Building disputes turn on progress claims, variations, defects and programme, and a lawyer who has run jobs reads those documents the way the client does. It is a secondary strand rather than the firm's identity, and we do not present ourselves as a construction specialist when most of what we do is commercial, trust and structuring work.

How we work

• Fixed fees. We quote a fixed fee in writing before work begins, so you know the cost before you commit rather than after.
• Plain answers. If the sensible course is to do nothing, or if a proposed step costs more in tax than it saves, we say so.
• Direct access. You deal with the lawyer doing the work.
• Turnaround. Document work is generally measured in days, not weeks.

This page describes the firm and the kinds of matters we act on. It is not legal advice.