Estate & Charitable Planning

• Experience in drafting basic and complex estate planning documents for individuals, couples and families, including wills, revocable trusts, powers of attorney, medical directives, irrevocable life insurance trusts, irrevocable gifting trusts and generation-skipping trusts.
• Advise clients on the use of grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs) as an estate freeze technique. Have implemented “rolling” or “cascading” GRATs to further leverage this technique.
• Implement business succession plans for owners of closely held businesses, including recapitalizations of shares or other ownership interests, outright gifts, GRATs and sales to defective grantor trust transactions.
• Design and implement asset protection planning strategies using multiple limited liability companies and domestic asset protection trusts. Advise clients on asset protection risks and benefits of various types of assets and entities.
• Counsel clients on college savings vehicles including the tax-advantaged Section 529 college savings plans.
• Advise on all types of charitable giving arrangements including charitable remainder trusts, charitable lead trusts, charitable gift annuities and private foundations.
• Draft lifetime QTIP Trusts, Qualified Personal Residence Trusts and Spousal Credit Shelter Trusts.
• Counsel professional athletes on estate planning, including NBA and NFL players, professional tennis players and Super/Moto Cross driver.
• Prepare prenuptial agreements.
• Advise clients on U.S. transfer tax strategies where one spouse is not a U.S. citizen and the clients hold assets outside of the United States.
• Advise U.S. citizen clients on aspects of planning for assets held outside of the United States.
• Advise foreign citizens on U.S. estate planning matters, including investments in U.S. assets and trust planning for family members living in the U.S.
• Create irrevocable trusts structured and funded to avoid all U.S. transfer taxes to benefit nonresident aliens’ family members living in the United States.
• Advise a large commercial bank on issues related to the bank exiting the personal trust business to limit or eliminate trailing liability concerns.
• Advise fiduciaries on estate and trust administration matters.
• Represent fiduciaries and clients in estate and trust litigation.

Nonprofit Organizations

• Advise charitable organizations on tax, endowment and planned giving matters.
• Advise nonprofit organizations on state-specific Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act provisions related to classification of endowment funds, spending restrictions, donor restrictions and release of donor restrictions.
• Advise a large family foundation on tax, grant-making and succession planning issues.
• Advise a private foundation on excise tax issues related to self-dealing and excess benefit issues.