Overview
Christina Santana Hammervold is an international tax and trust lawyer with significant experience counseling clients on a wide range of U.S. and cross-border tax planning matters. Christina’s clients range from entrepreneurs wishing to establish family offices, to established global families managing their own wealth in the multibillions, to some of the world’s most renowned trust companies and private banks. She has extensive experience with a wide range of global family structures and prides herself on delivering efficient, strategic, and results-oriented solutions for her clients.
Christina counsels clients as they navigate the U.S. legal system, focusing primarily on tax related matters, as well as the various other considerations that arise when families (or select family members) move to or invest in the United States. Christina is versatile and resolute on providing innovative, yet practical, legal strategies for her clients.
Christina handles a wide variety of matters for global families, including:
- Assisting clients who have failed to satisfy past U.S. tax and reporting obligations come into compliance, including assisting clients with making disclosures under the Streamlined Filing Compliance Procedures (under both the Streamlined Foreign Offshore Procedures and the Streamlined Domestic Offshore Procedures), the Delinquent FBAR Submission Procedures and the IRS Criminal Investigation Voluntary Disclosure Practice;
- Non-U.S. trust planning (including “foreign grantor trust” planning);
- Holistic U.S. / non-U.S. tax and estate planning (solving for global tax challenges, wealth transfer and succession considerations, privacy needs, and corporate governance and family office compliance issues);
- Structuring investments in U.S. real estate, U.S. businesses, and other U.S. assets;
- Structuring U.S. investment in non-U.S. assets;
- Pre-U.S. immigration / tax planning;
- Renunciation of U.S. citizenship / green cards;
- Assisting clients determine their beneficial ownership reporting requirements under the Corporate Transparency Act; and
- Structuring and properly maintaining family offices.
Christina has significant experience working with families in Latin American, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, PRC, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and, of course, the United States. She considers herself fortunate to work with some of the most successful businesspeople, former politicians, and celebrities in these regions and the trust companies and private banks that act for them.
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Proposed Beneficial Ownership Regulations in the U.S., STEP Los Angeles
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Proposed Beneficial Ownership Regulations in the U.S., STEP Hong Kong
Education
- Miami University, B.A., magna cum laude
- Vanderbilt University Law School, J.D., Senior Managing Editor, Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law
Bar Admissions
- Illinois
Languages
- Spanish
Recognition
- Named to Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch list in Tax Law (2024 and 2025)
- Named on the Private Client Global Elite Directory’s “Ones to Watch” list (2019-2021)
Affiliations
- Co-Chair, Law Firm Antiracism Alliance’s Reproductive Justice Working Group
- Associate Member, STEP (The Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners)