Practice Areas

Our planning for individual and business clients covers all aspects of transferring their wealth, through the strategic use of traditional and cutting-edge income and asset transfer devices to minimize the impact of income taxes, gift taxes, estate taxes and generation skipping transfer taxes, both during lifetime and at death. We routinely counsel our clients in the establishment and continuation of gifting programs, requiring coordination with existing business and investment entities and, often, the creation of new ones. We regularly create and work with our clients' limited liability companies, closely-held corporations, limited and general partnerships, and limited liability partnerships to promote the management of their assets, while also taking advantage of opportunities to achieve transfer tax savings through gift tax valuation discount techniques. We also implement grantor retained annuity trusts ("GRAT"), grantor retained unitrust trusts ("GRUT"), qualified personal residence trusts ("QPRT"), sales to intentionally defective grantor trusts, intra-family loans, irrevocable life insurance trusts, gift trusts, generation skipping trusts, and charitable lead trusts ("CLT") and charitable remainder trusts ("CRT") for our clients to transfer assets to their families while minimizing estate tax and gift tax consequences. We also assist our clients in the valuation and reporting of their gifts in the most accurate and beneficial manner.

Our counsel to our clients includes estate tax planning to take full advantage of all available estate and generation skipping transfer tax credits, deductions, exemptions and elections, including planning to make full use of the unified credit exemption, the marital deduction for both citizens and noncitizens, generation skipping transfer tax exemption planning, charitable planning, and post-mortem income tax planning. We regularly work with our clients to implement wills and revocable trusts that incorporate unified credit exemption, marital deduction trusts, generation skipping trusts, testamentary CRTs and CLTs, as well as strategies to allow the estate to benefit from special use valuation, qualified family owned business exclusions, estate tax deferral for businesses, tax-free redemptions, and retirement account deferral planning.

Legal Alert:
New Estate Tax Bill Restricts Minority Interest Discounts (February 2009)