For more than half a century, our firm’s estate planning lawyers have developed a special talent for sophisticated estate tax planning and designing highly customized and complex will and trust arrangements.  Our clients value the experience of our Estate Planning attorneys.

While wills and living “A-B” trusts are the basic estate planning building blocks, we also implement plans involving more sophisticated tools, such as:

• Gifting techniques
• Qualified personal residence trusts (QPRTS)
• Grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATS)
• Sales to intentionally “defective” grantor trusts, private annuities, family partnerships and limited liability companies
• Charitable trusts
• Private foundations
• Irrevocable insurance trusts
• Generation-skipping or “dynasty” trusts
• Special Needs Planning
• Pension and IRA distribution planning

Although we have a wealth of experience and skills employing sophisticated techniques in the proper circumstances, our focus is always the client’s goals and desires. The listed tools can be useful to achieving a client’s objectives, but we never assume that tax reduction is the client’s sole or primary concern.  In fact, non-tax goals — such as leaving property in trust to be managed for the benefit of a client’s loved ones or favorite charities, or to provide an incentive to younger family members to be productive in their own right and not simply rely on an inheritance from parents or grandparents — are often very important considerations for a client’s plan.

We represent individuals and families who own and operate a wide range of businesses. In that connection, we are frequently called upon to advise clients with respect to a variety of tools to aid in business succession planning to transition the ownership and management of a family business from an older generation of owners to a younger generation.

We also represent a number of retirees and have vast experience resolving issues they often face, such as cash flow issues and state residency issues. We have attorneys who are licensed to practice in Florida, which helps with the transition issues and assuring that plans are current in light of the transition.

Finally, we also assist clients in planning for disability, using durable powers of attorney and “advance directives,” which are living wills, health care powers of attorney, donor registry enrollment forms and HIPAA waivers.