Estate Planning Attorneys.

Without a will or trust in place, your assets are unlikely to pass to the people you want, in the way you intend. A simple will lets you clarify who takes what and when — and it is often wise to leave assets to children in trust so they are managed until the children are ready. Because a will requires court approval, probate is usually more expensive than administering a revocable trust.

A revocable trust — paired with a bypass or credit shelter trust and a marital or QTIP trust — lets you direct who takes what without subjecting your estate to probate, and can also produce substantial estate tax savings. Where additional planning is appropriate, we also establish irrevocable life insurance trusts (ILITs), qualified personal residence trusts (QPRTs), grantor retained income trusts (GRITs), and grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs), and we help you identify which, if any, of these structures fit your goals.

Living wills and other health care directives let you determine the type of care you receive and delegate health care decision-making to people you trust. We help ensure the right people are named and that the authority granted reflects your wishes.

Durable powers of attorney serve a similar role on the financial side. If you become disabled, these documents help keep your assets funded into your revocable living trust and your personal affairs in order, with decision-making authority delegated exactly as you specify.

Whether coupled with a business buy-sell agreement or used for liquidity or estate creation and supplementation, we are familiar with all forms of life insurance and how each can be applied within an estate plan to achieve a specific objective.

Support and educational trusts for children and other family members can be designed to minimize income taxes while ensuring resources remain available to your heirs and beneficiaries in line with your wishes.

Special needs trusts are critical when a beneficiary receives — or may become eligible for — public assistance. If assets are not held in a properly drafted special needs trust, the beneficiary can lose those benefits, so these documents must be tailored carefully to the situation.

Where appropriate, we work with you to create or reorganize a business structure that minimizes or defers estate taxes, or to implement a buy-out agreement or insurance program so enough liquid assets are available to cover any taxes that cannot be eliminated or deferred. This includes forming family limited partnerships (FLPs), family LLCs (FLLCs), and joint ventures to develop or operate real estate and other business projects while reducing income and estate tax exposure and preserving control.

Drawing on deep familiarity with every form of business entity — corporations, partnerships, LLCs, and joint ventures — we also design and implement buy-sell and stock restriction agreements and the insurance programs used to fund those buy-outs.

We are not retirement benefit administrators, but we are well-versed in retirement benefit planning and how it should be coordinated with the rest of your estate plan. The goal is straightforward: getting your retirement benefits to the people you intend, with minimal estate and gift tax, and without your beneficiaries losing value to an unintended acceleration of the income tax owed on those benefits.

Our estate tax planning attorneys are actively involved in international matters, addressing both the cross-border estate planning issues and the income tax reporting obligations that have drawn increasing scrutiny in recent years.

Many clients want to pass assets in a way that avoids a second layer of estate tax in their children's estates. This is called generation-skipping: estate tax skips a generation while your children still retain access to the funds. We help structure transfers so wealth is preserved across multiple generations.

We plan, negotiate, and draft prenuptial agreements, postnuptial agreements, cohabitation agreements, and similar arrangements to:

• Provide for the continued unified operation and control of family businesses and investment properties following a divorce.
• Protect assets and earnings from potential claims of ex-spouses or others.

If a loved one passes away before they were able to implement or update an estate plan, post-mortem planning still offers ways to optimize how assets are distributed and how income and estate taxes are minimized — including through qualified disclaimers.

Alongside the planning side of our practice, we provide comprehensive assistance administering both trusts and estates, including:

• Preparation, filing, and audit of estate tax and gift tax returns.
• Representation of fiduciaries in administrative matters.
• Representation of clients in will contests and other intrafamily disputes.
• Representation of beneficiaries against fiduciaries alleged to have breached their duties.

For charitably inclined clients who want to formalize their giving, we have helped form private foundations and family foundations. When properly structured, these benefit the chosen charities and can also pass control of a family asset down across multiple generations.

When a client is charitably motivated, we help transition the chosen assets or wealth to the chosen charity. That often involves analyzing whether a charitable trust — a standard CRT, a CRIT, or a CRUT — is the right vehicle, and weighing it against alternatives such as an outright gift, a bargain sale, or an installment sale. An appointment with one of our estate planning attorneys can help you determine how best to meet your charitable objectives without disrupting the rest of your plan.

Asset protection planning structures how you hold and transfer assets so they are better insulated from future creditors, lawsuits, and other claims. The most effective planning happens well before a claim arises — once a creditor problem exists, the available options narrow considerably.

Depending on your circumstances, this can involve selecting and structuring the right business entities, using trusts with appropriate spendthrift or discretionary provisions to protect what you leave to beneficiaries, coordinating insurance as a first line of defense, and keeping personal and business holdings properly separated. We help you identify which techniques fit your situation and integrate them with the rest of your estate plan, so asset protection and your transfer goals work together rather than against each other.