Trusts and fiduciary duties matter when property is managed by one person for another's benefit. Most trust money, which is invested by financial institutions around the City's Royal Exchange, comes from people saving for retirement. In 2011, UK pension funds held over £1 trillion of assets, and unit trusts held £583.8 billion.

The National Trust, now a registered charity and endorsed by several Acts of Parliament, was established as a trust corporation in 1895, to hold property like Stourhead gardens (pictured) across the UK for the benefit of public recreation.

People's wills and testaments, like William Shakespeare's will here, often present difficulties in trust law where the meaning of what is intended is not completely clear. The House of Lords, however, has said a trust should only fail if its meaning is "utterly impossible" to deduce.

During the 2008 financial crisis the insolvency of Lehman Brothers, whose sign was auctioned here at Christie's, led to a mass of litigation to sort out which bank investors might have sufficiently certain equitable rights in the financial assets, or who would be the unlucky unsecured creditors.