Business advisors and family firms in Nigeria: The role of goodwill trust

This study contributes to the literature on professional advice for family firms. Specifically, we apply the goodwill trust construct to examine the relationship between family firms and professional lawyers who provide them with business advice. We classified the services offered by lawyers to family firms into three groups: statutory services, non-statutory services and family-specific services. Using a sample of small and medium sized Nigerian family firms, we found that the statutory and family-specific service that lawyers provide to family firms had a significant and positive impact on goodwill trust, in other words, they engender goodwill trust between firms and lawyers.