'Downton Abbey' proves that you can make anything a business story

Spoiler alert! Turns out that the show has become a sensation among financial planners and lawyers who say that the Earl of Grantham's mishandling of money can be a lesson for today's investors. "It's like a law-school exam in what not to do," Jonathan Forster, a lawyer at Greenberg Traurig, tells the WSJ. The most obvious lesson is to diversify your holdings. As fans of the show know, the Earl of Grantham messes up big time by losing much of his American wife's fortune on a Canadian railway that goes belly up. He gets bailed by Matthew Crawley, the earl's third cousin once removed who ends up marrying the earl's oldest daughter, Mary. From the Journal:

After Matthew inherits a pile of money from his former fiancée's family and invests it in Downton Abbey, the earl invites Matthew to join the family business. But when Matthew starts digging into the books, he finds big financial problems, and the estate's longtime overseer resigns suddenly. Near the end of the show's most recent season, Robert Crawley is bristling at his sons-in-law's efforts to modernize the estate's operations--even though the work could well keep the enterprise solvent. Misgivings and resentment are normal during the changing of the guard in a family business, Mr. Forster says, especially when other family members also offer up their opinions. (In this case, the earl's daughter Mary and his mother, the dowager countess, often meddle behind closed doors.) There are ways to ease such problems when bringing the next generation into the family business. The first step: Make sure everyone involved is clear on who has voting rights, veto rights and the power to fire, along with the size of each person's equity stake in the business, Mr. Forster advises.

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One big planning error cropped up during the program's third-season finale. The episode ends with Matthew Crawley, the son-in-law, getting killed in a car crash the same day his wife gives birth to their first child, a son. Rather than giving his inheritance to his father-in-law to prop up the estate, he should have put the money in a trust to protect it, [says Martin Shenkman, an estate-planning lawyer in Paramus, N.J.] Such trusts were already in use before World War I, and some of his own clients are beneficiaries of trusts established back then. In 1907, for example, Henry Phipps formed Bessemer Trust as his family office to manage the trusts holding the proceeds from the sale of Carnegie Steel, which he had founded with Andrew Carnegie. Bessemer Trust has served six generations of the Phipps family, and manages investments for more than 2,100 other families with $78 billion in assets.