Henri-Lee Stalk, J.D., Ph.D.

I help families navigate the personal and relational dimensions of wealth, strengthen communication, and build structures that reflect what they truly value and where they intend to go.

Wealth changes a family's questions before it changes its answers. It surfaces in decisions about who leads, who inherits, and what is spoken aloud versus left unsaid.

I work at the intersection of psychology, law, and family dynamics. This is the relational and decision-making terrain that runs alongside every legal document and financial plan, and it ultimately determines whether that plan endures.

I completed a JD/PhD (Clinical Psychology) program at the University of Hawai'i and began working in sexual abuse trial consultation, where I learned how little the legal process alone accounts for what a family is carrying. I then joined the Boston Consulting Group, advising leadership teams through complex organizational change. From there, I spent several years in clinical practice in Manhattan, using cognitive behavioral therapy to help individuals and families work through challenges they were facing. That experience led me to Generation Transition Advisors, where I served first as a Partner and later as Senior Advisor, working with global business-owning families on governance, ownership strategy, and next-generation development. I then started my own advisory practice, focused on supporting families of wealth.

Each chapter has shaped how I work today. Clinical psychology gave me the tools for meaningful change, law gave me the discipline of structure and intention, and consulting gave me the business acumen and skill in stakeholder management. Together, they allow me to move fluidly between a family's emotional reality and the practical decisions before it.

This focus is not only professional. I was born in Tokyo, Japan, and grew up as the eldest of six children. Navigating a large, complex family from an early age instilled in me a firsthand understanding of how layered and demanding family systems can be, an understanding that continues to shape how I listen and how I work.

The questions families face around wealth rarely sit within a single discipline. How does a family speak openly about money across generations? How are roles clarified when family, assets, and business are closely intertwined? How does the next generation come to define its own relationship to what it will inherit? These are not purely legal questions, nor purely financial, nor purely psychological. They require holding several dimensions of a family's situation at once, each given its full weight.