Dawn Goodman

Dawn Goodman is a senior lawyer in the trust, estate and inheritance disputes team at Withers LLP in London, and was named Trusts and Succession Issues Lawyer of the Year in the United Kingdom at the 2024 Corporate INTL Global Awards. She is one of the most experienced contentious trusts practitioners in the country, having specialised in the field for more than thirty years and helped shape its professional institutions.

Her practice centres on trust and succession litigation in all its forms. She acts in disputes over the interpretation and management of trusts, in claims for breach of trust and breach of fiduciary duty, and in international succession matters that raise difficult questions of conflicts of law. Her clients include beneficiaries, trustees, protectors and family offices, and her work frequently spans several jurisdictions and legal traditions, including disputes where common law, civil law and religious principles of succession must be reconciled. Such cases call for both technical mastery of trust law and an understanding of how different legal systems interact.

Dawn Goodman's standing in this area is long established. She was the first litigator admitted to the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners and a founding member of the Association of Contentious Trust and Probate Specialists, and she is the author and co-editor of a leading text on international trust and divorce litigation. She is recognised in the Legal 500 Hall of Fame for contentious trust and succession disputes and ranked among the most senior names for private wealth disputes, a reflection of the complexity and profile of the cases she handles and the regard in which she is held by peers and clients.

The international character of much of her work is a defining feature. Modern trust and succession disputes increasingly involve families whose members, assets and interests are spread across borders, and resolving them calls for a practitioner who understands not only English trust law but also how it interacts with other legal systems and, at times, with religious principles of inheritance. Dawn Goodman has built her reputation on precisely this cross-border expertise, which few practitioners can match in depth.

A CEDR-accredited mediator as well as a litigator, she brings a resolution-minded approach to disputes that are often deeply personal, while retaining the technical depth to litigate the most demanding trust and succession claims. Disputes among beneficiaries and trustees can jeopardise family wealth and relationships alike, so her ability to combine robust advocacy with a readiness to settle where appropriate is a significant asset to her clients. The 2024 Corporate INTL award recognises that rare combination of experience, authority and international reach, and confirms her position as a leading UK lawyer on trusts and succession issues.