The elite attorney Jaroslav Havel has been building the largest family office in Central Europe, a unique club for business families. He helps them access the world’s most exciting investment opportunities, and work together to protect their assets, ensure a high-quality life, and educate the next generation. The managing partner of HAVEL & PARTNERS opens up a whole new world of multigenerational wealth management to Czech and Slovak family businesses.

In the first half of your life, you work hard, take risks, and build your business. In the second half, it is mainly about working with capital and ensuring that the money you earned appreciates in value. Having built the largest law firm in Central Europe, Jaroslav Havel has been at the apex of business for almost thirty years and now makes good use of his experience, contacts and reputation in his ONE FAMILY OFFICE.

The investor and business club offers elite services for wealthy business families who want to be able to live, invest and protect their assets like Western dollar billionaires.

“We bring to Czechia a unique concept of multi-family office for wealthy families who wish to manage their assets collectively. Having joined forces, they have more capital and stronger bargaining power, greater efficiency and lower costs. They may not be the world’s richest people, but they can still gain access to the most exciting investment opportunities,” said Jaroslav Havel.

The idea to set up a family office arose from his own need to manage his assets and to let them appreciate in value. Together with his partners from ONE FAMILY OFFICE and HAVEL & PARTNERS, they are the “founding family” of the largest family office in Central Europe, a project they launched fifteen months ago.

Their assets represent a slight majority of the nearly CZK twelve billion currently managed by the family office. ONE FAMILY OFFICE expects another CZK four to six billion to be added this year and aims at one billion dollars of invested money, i.e. about CZK 23 billion, by the end of 2026.

It primarily targets clients with over USD 10 million in disposable assets, having associate members who regularly invest with the office as well as full members who manage all their assets through the family office.

Opportunities in the private playground

“My investment strategy is to build a high-yielding, balanced, and maximally safe global portfolio, diversified across currencies and continents. I also achieve high returns through active investing. And I expect active involvement from our partners. We make joint club investments with successful, wealthy and smart people who have excellent business information and insight. On the other hand, we also take care of families who do not have the capacity to invest, and together we create very conservative portfolios for them that ensure a regular annuity and a stable overall yield of around ten to fifteen percent per year,” said Havel.

He believes that the greatest added valuethe multi-family office offers is the access to unique opportunities ininternational private markets, ranging from venture capital investments overthe world’s largest private equity and hedge funds to the listing of globalcompanies.

“We’re getting to extremely interesting opportunities on the market that are very difficult to access,” emphasised Jaroslav Havel. “We are also able to gain that access because today, HAVEL & PARTNERS is a world-renowned firm, and we have partnerships with family offices in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Dubai.”

The company’s core management also includes David Neveselý, an attorney-at-law, Peter Bálint, a former investment manager of the richest Slovakian Ivan Chrenek, and Jan Mynář, the managing partner of OneCap, a private equity firm. The advisory body also includes Constantin Kinský, an investor, former banker and family wealth manager, Petr Řehák, Equa bank’s former CEO and now Deloitte’s partner for financial institutions across CEE, Andrej Kiska Jr., a banker, startup investor and entrepreneur, and Pavel Riegger, former EY Advisory’s partner for CEE and now Trask Group’s CEO and co-owner.

The entire team is composed of seventy members, almost half of them being women. “In the investment world, it’s extraordinary. However, it is important for us because we want to be partners to the families, and in families, men and women tend to be equally represented,” said Veronika Dvořáková, a partner at ONE FAMILY OFFICE and HAVEL & PARTNERS.

Accounting for about a third of the world’s wealth according to global data, women’s share is increasing. “We observe the same trend in Czechia and Slovakia, as evidenced by our NextŽeny survey. If the property of the families of the ten wealthiest Czechs and Slovaks were passed on to the next generation as provided for by statutory law, up to 70% of that property could be owned by women,” said Dvořáková.

Women are getting richer not only because of inheritance, longer life spans or divorces, but also because they are becoming more educated, more successful and more likely than ever to reach top positions. “A McKinsey study predicts that women will control about 38 percent of all investable assets in the United States by 2030, and that Western Europe will experience a similar trend,” said Dvořáková.

Assemble a Lamborghini

In addition to investments and asset appreciation, the family office also focuses on intangible family values. “Our goal is to make the life of the families as high-quality and easy as possible. Our offer includes concierge medicine and access to superior healthcare services. We provide both physical and cybersecurity as well as reputation protection. In addition, we help family businesses with succession planning, successor education and training, and philanthropic activities,” said Dvořáková.

“We also publish dozens of translations of interesting books on investing, doing business and managing companies, and the sophisticated collection of our library includes hundreds of books. For example, we have published a work entitled The University of Berkshire Hathaway to mark the founding of ONE FAMILY OFFICE, which offers insight into the thinking and strategy of the world’s most successful investor Warren Buffett and his partner – who happens to be a lawyer as well – Charlie Munger,” said Jaroslav Havel, who is trying to increase financial literacy in Czechia through ONE FAMILY OFFICE.

His long-term vision is to create the most sophisticated family office in Central and Eastern Europe. With ONE FAMILY OFFICE, he seeks to open a whole new world of multigenerational wealth management for family businesses, which the first generation of Czech entrepreneurs is only slowly discovering.

“We are unique in terms of the complexity of our services and the exceptional quality of each of them. It’s hard to assemble a Lamborghini using mediocre stuff. You can only succeed if every part is by far the best. And that’s what we are – from legal services over investment advisory to concierge services,” said Havel.

This article was first published in Forbes Magazine in May 2025 and has been edited for length.