Family Wealth Report Family Office Fintech Forum 2025

Josh’s passion is to use his education, training and experience in an integrated manner to bring thoughtful, personalized family consulting services to his clients. Alone, or with a team, whether financial, legal, political or familial, he brings deep thought, innovation, drive, integrity, and leadership to add value to every situation he encounters. For nearly two decades, Josh turned this skillset inward and managed his family’s 30+ year income and estate tax controversies. Applying a coordinated, cohesive, strategic approach to the various income tax, estate tax, innocent spouse, collection, and other tax matters involved,  Josh developed and managed a team of experts and professionals, and the controversies, to a successful adjudication through administrative means, the Tax Court, three Circuit Courts of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court. Josh also took on the responsibility of reorganizing his family’s complex business, tax, and estate structures, building the systems and tools necessary to function as a single-family office, while maintaining family dialog and harmony among three generations of fifteen individuals with a wide diversity of education, financial and legal literacy, geography, age and needs. This gave Josh a hands-on, direct exposure to a multitude of issues faced by families of wealth dealing with intergenerational wealth management, wealth transfer, and family dynamics. More recently, Josh has been consulting with other families to provide similar family, legacy, business, tax, and estate planning services. Prior to joining his family’s business, Josh implemented this philosophic framework by becoming the de facto general counsel to many of his clients, using his talents to balance their business needs and legal risks, having a full view of their business and legal concerns, managing their fees and fee expectations, and enabling them to focus their energy on their core competency of building their businesses. Josh’s legal, business and family office experience includes corporate and securities law, mergers and acquisitions, real estate, venture capital, private equity, bankruptcy, commercial lending, family office operations, trusts and estates, multi-generational wealth planning and consulting, and more. Josh has been a frequent speaker and panelist on family, family office, political, economic, and philanthropic topics. Josh has also been active philanthropically throughout his career, working with dozens of arts, cultural, and educational organizations. Most recently he founded the Alliance for a Better Utah, a nontraditional, non-governmental organization dedicated to providing balance, accountability and transparency in Utah policy and politics. Josh is of counsel to the Chicago law firm of Barack, Ferrazzano, Kirschbaum & Nagelberg. He is President of Chicago Financial, Inc., a single-family office, and is a Director and Vice President of the Kanter Family Foundation. Josh has served on the boards of numerous for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations. Josh received his J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1987. He earned a BA/BS in Economics (magna cum laude) and Political Science from Emory University in 1984.