Tax and Business Planning

• Designed numerous holding company (family office) arrangements, pooled investment funds, preferred partnership/stock recapitalizations, inter family installment sales to grantor trusts, self canceling installment notes, private annuities and tax free corporate divisions to accomplish a variety of family investment, tax and business objectives.
• Designed numerous generation skipping trusts to hold voting control of family-owned businesses.
• Designed transaction involving recapitalization of a bank holding company’s capital structure to have voting and nonvoting shares, sale of nonvoting shares to grantor trusts, S corporation election, and change in control filings with the Office of Thrift Supervision.
• Provided tax advice on collar transactions and prepaid forward contracts for concentrated positions of publicly traded shares.
• Represented taxpayers in IRS gift and estate tax audits involving valuation of family limited partnerships, S corporations and other entities.

Charitable Planning

• Designed numerous family foundations and supporting organizations to facilitate charitable and business succession planning objectives.
• Advised private foundations concerning private foundation excise taxes with respect to self-dealing transactions, investments and excess business holdings, and expenditure responsibility and international grant making requirements.
• Experienced with all types of charitable giving arrangements.
• Created first of its kind medicaid pooled trust for a community foundation by which members of the family of an individual with disabilities may acquire a charitable gift annuity for such individual’s benefit to be administered through the pooled trust. Obtained classification of the pooled trust as a supporting organization to the community foundation through Tax Court litigation (Disability Foundation vs. Comm.).
• Advised public company concerning merger of foundations in connection with a public company merger, including the design of related governance documents and investment arrangements.
• Advised family concerning combination of charitable trust and foundation, including obtaining ruling from the IRS to confirm intended tax results.
• Advised public charity concerning classification of funds under Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act.
• Advised public company concerning creation of employee relief fund and obtained IRS classification of the fund as a public charity.
• Designed U.S. investment entity for family’s charitable and non-charitable trusts to allow trusts to pool investments in off shore hedge funds.

Fiduciary Litigation

• Represented natural born descendants to obtain Court order that the term “issue” as used in trusts created by their ancestors in 1933 and 1951 did not include adopted children.
• Obtained Court order to reform and terminate decedent’s testamentary trust to allow beneficial interests in trust for “skip persons” to be distributed to them in 2010 without imposition of generation skipping transfer tax.
• Represented corporate fiduciary in Court proceeding concerning estate tax apportionment issues associated with fixed price buy sell arrangement.