For many law firms, trusts are where otherwise smooth onboarding processes start to slow down. 

Recently we’ve spoken to compliance professionals and legal directors across different firms to chat about why that is… and find a solution

Unlike companies, there’s no Companies House / ASIC-style register to rely on. The information sits inside long, technical trust deeds. Roles and relationships are layered and the people responsible for AML checks rarely have deep experience of trusts.

Here are 4 key reasons trusts create friction in onboarding and compliance - and how Legl’s latest trust capabilities can make that friction disappear.

1. There’s no public register to rely on

“For most parts of AML there is an official register or a public record where anyone in our team can go to get data. For Trusts there is nothing like this, so we have to turn to manually reviewing the trust deed and asking for more details from clients.”
- Compliance Manager

With companies, we’ve become used to key information being accessible whether your firm is using an optimised client-lifecycle management tool like Legl or even if you are just referencing Companies House, ASIC or another resource. However, when it comes to trusts, the key details are buried in a deed which could be dozens or even hundreds of pages long. 

Because of this, getting started with trusts work often means:

• Manually reviewing complex documents and deeds
  
• Repeatedly going back to clients for clarification (which everybody wants to avoid)
  
• Delays before AML checks can even begin

How Legl makes it easy

Legl can analyse a trust deed and extract the key details compliance teams need in under a minute.

Identifying Trustees, Beneficiaries, Settlors, Appointors and the trust assets, all automated.

That information is converted into structured data, giving you something that mirrors the clarity of a public register for a company, without chasing your client for more information.

You can move straight to the appropriate AML checks, confident you’re working from accurate, complete information.

2. Manual review is slow, error-prone and senior resource-heavy

“It’s a time saver. Without the option of this, I would have to rely on team members to enter the correct information manually each time and people make mistakes. I'm a huge advocate of automated solutions working on things like this in the background.”
– Head of Risk & Compliance

Interpreting trust deeds can take hours, particularly when deeds don’t follow a conventional structure or are complex in structure. Reviewing manually still carries the risk of human error and often results is senior legal staff with deep experience of trust law to be drafted in.

How Legl makes it easy

Legl uses smart AI to analyse lengthy trust deeds, even those running close to 1,000 pages in less than a minute.

Instead of manually deconstructing dense legal documents, your team receives structured, ready-to-use data that connects directly into your AML workflows in the background.

It’s AI applied where it makes the biggest difference:
Quickly analysing large volumes of complex information and surfacing exactly what compliance professionals need.

The result?

• Fewer delays
  
• Fewer errors
  
• More time spent on high-value, client-facing work

3. Compliance teams are asked to be trusts experts (when they’re not)

“Trusts can be very complicated, but the individuals in the firm who are usually checking identity and running client onboarding often don't have the qualifications and experience to understand the basis of the trust.”
– Compliance Manager

Compliance professionals are experts in assessing risk, professional and AML regulations and what actions need to be taken to ensure the firm has taken proper measures to prevent fraud, crime or unacceptable commercial risks.

Onboarding teams are typically expected to focus on delivering fast client service and rapid communication, to enable legal work to commence quickly.

In most cases, it is unreasonable to expect those team members to also be specialists in trusts law.

Yet when a new trust client comes on board, members of the compliance and onboarding team are often in a position where they need to interpret complex deeds and legal drafting to work out:

• Who really controls the trust
  
• Who benefits from it
  
• Who requires AML checks
  
• What elements might create risk

That creates uncertainty and delays. It also means that busy senior fee-earners or trust specialists often become a bottleneck in the onboarding process, as their trusts expertise is required before the initial AML checks and client intake can properly begin.

How Legl makes it easy

Typically compliance teams will know what they are looking for - with trust deeds the problem is that it can be difficult to know where to look, especially if a document is 100s of pages long.

Legl extracts the essential information compliance teams need from the trust deed, clearly and accurately, so they can focus on what they do best.

That means compliance teams stay in control of the process, with the clarity they need to carry out appropriate AML checks confidently and efficiently. Fee-earners and trust specialists can be left to focus on the legal work.

4. Trusts aren’t stand-alone entities so risk can’t be assessed as a stand-alone exercise

“What makes Trusts work different, is that individuals, businesses and trusts are not all stand-alone entities. It would be really helpful to be able to see who has a role connected to the trust and what kind of role someone has within the structure.”
– Legal Director

Trusts are almost never simple, stand-alone entities. They typically involve:

• Multiple different roles: Trustees, Beneficiaries, Settlors, Appointors
  
• Multiple entity types could occupy those roles: Individuals, Companies etc.

The way we must approach AML in trust matters, and the questions we ask, depends on each person’s role within the structure.

Many compliance platforms and processes are not designed with this complexity in mind. Information ends up fragmented across PDFs, emails and separate records making it difficult to maintain visibility of risk or how the firm’s clients and contacts are connected over time.

How Legl makes it easy

Legl is built to manage complex client lifecycles.

When you create a trust in Legl:

• The trust is recorded as a structured entity
  
• All associated individuals and companies are clearly linked
  
• You get structured data on each person’s role within the trust and the trust assets
  
• AML checks and compliance activities related to the trust and its associated contacts are connected, fully visible and auditable 

You can see the full picture and there are no disconnected parts or loose ends.

From complexity to clarity

Legl’s mission is to help law firms manage each client lifecycle as one efficient, cohesive process, where changes, compliance activity, commercial risks and opportunities can all be clearly observed, even in the most complex cases.

Trusts may be complex, but with Legl, your process throughout onboarding, compliance and understanding client data, dosen’t have to be.

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