2019 – PRESENT — COMPANY HISTORY AND MISSION
How Legatum came to be
Legatum started in 2019 after a small observation repeated itself enough times to become a pattern. When families in Petaling Jaya dealt with a household transition — a parent moving out of a long-held home, an elderly relative who had kept everything in a particular order for decades — the paperwork and the objects were the part no one knew what to do with. Solicitors handled registration. Banks handled accounts. But the box of letters from the 1970s, the folders nobody had labelled, the photographs filed under nothing in particular: those sat where they were, or were moved from room to room, or were put aside until someone had time.
The founder, Sharifah Nadia Amin, had spent fifteen years as an archivist and records administrator for a private institution in Kuala Lumpur before leaving to work directly with families. The work at Legatum is the same kind of work she had done professionally, applied to the household scale — sorting, labelling, cataloguing, photographing, indexing — but carried out at a pace the family sets, in the home the materials already occupy, with outputs that belong entirely to the family.
Legatum operates as a single-coordinator practice. Sessions are taken on by appointment, and the number of families engaged at any time is kept small enough to mean each one receives the coordinator's full attention. There is no junior staff, no outsourced scanning, and no cloud storage. Every output — physical or digital — leaves with the family at the end of each session.
THE PRACTICE — WHO CARRIES OUT THE WORK
The people at Legatum
Sharifah Nadia Amin
Founder & Lead Coordinator
Fifteen years in institutional archives before founding Legatum. Handles all client sessions personally and writes every summary and catalogue entry.
Roshan Bahadur
Records & Digitisation Specialist
Oversees the scanning and digital indexing component of longer programmes. Trained in document preservation and file-format standards for long-term readability.
Lim Tze Ying
Objects Cataloguer
Handles the photography, measurement and description work in the Objects and Provenance Programme. Background in fine arts documentation and material culture.
WORKING STANDARDS — HOW EVERY SESSION IS CONDUCTED
What we hold ourselves to
Confidentiality, in writing
A confidentiality agreement is available before the first session. No material seen during a programme is discussed, shared or referenced outside it. Legatum retains no copies once the engagement closes.
Family-owned digital outputs
All scans and digital files are placed on storage media the family owns and controls. Nothing is uploaded to any third-party service or cloud system operated by Legatum.
Clear scope, nothing beyond it
Legatum does not read documents for their legal or financial content, does not advise on what to do with anything, and does not contact any external party on the family's behalf. Scope is defined at the outset and held to throughout.
Archival-standard labelling
Physical folder and box labels follow conventions drawn from institutional archive practice, using acid-free materials and a dating format consistent across the entire arrangement.
Object photography on neutral grounds
Every catalogued object is photographed against a neutral background with consistent lighting, measured and given a reference number that matches both the printed catalogue and the digital record.
Annual review calendar
The Complete Records programme includes a written annual review schedule so the arrangement remains current. Families who complete the programme can engage Legatum for a half-day review each year.
VALUES — WHAT GUIDES THE WAY WE WORK
Records work, done carefully
Estate and household records tend to accumulate the way time does — in layers, without a plan. The letters from a grandparent's working years sit with utility bills from two decades later. Photographs have no dates. A folder labelled "important" contains a mixture of things some of which are, and some of which no longer are. This is not a failure; it is simply what happens when life is lived rather than administered.
Legatum's role is to bring those layers into an order that can be read and maintained. The coordinator works from the premise that the family has the context — the knowledge of who owned what, when, and what the story attached to it is — and that her role is to provide the structure those stories can rest inside. The work is collaborative by design, not because it is faster that way, but because the family's knowledge is irreplaceable and the arrangement is only useful if they can navigate it.
Legatum is based in Kota Damansara, Petaling Jaya, and works primarily with families in the Klang Valley. Administrative records support for estate papers, household documents, heirloom objects and digital files — carried out to a professional standard, at a pace that fits the family, with everything remaining in their possession throughout.
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