1) My brother's friend's opinions
2) My brothers' friend's opinions
I hope "1" and "2" are pretty clear and correct.
Now, let us suppose that the brother in "1" is a brother-in-law and that all the brothers in "2" are brothers-in-law.
Question is: How do we rewrite "1" and "2" in these cases?
Following the J.R.'s suggestion, I have done some preliminary researches and I found that when in-laws become possessive brothers-in-law is written brother-in-law's. So, I would conclude that we should rewrite "1" and "2" in the same way, as follow.
i) My brother-in-law's friend's opinions.
ii) My brother-in-law's friend's opinions.
But, if it is so, how can we distinguish the two different cases?
Best Answer
So let's start with the singular 'brother-in-law', which is perfectly clear. If you have a single brother-in-law and he possesses something, this is written as:
If you have more than one brother-in-law (no possession) you would write:
This is because when pluralizing a compound noun, we always add the 's' to the most 'important' word. The fact that they are brothers is most important, so it gets the 's'. This is the same for "mothers-in-law", "fathers-in-law", etc.
If you have more than one brother-in-law and they all own something:
Confirmation of this final construction can be found at grammarbook.com: