Estate Planning, Trusts and Probate
The Estate Planning, Trusts and Probate Practice Group provides a full array of estate planning and administration services to ensure the orderly transmission of wealth; be it gift planning during lifetime, planning for incapacity, or estate planning to take effect following lifetime. We regularly engage in sophisticated estate planning for high net-worth individuals who require significant tax planning. We are equally cognizant of the need to plan those affairs in a manner most likely to protect the client’s family, promote family harmony and minimize family acrimony. It is our training and years of experience in observing estate plans coming to fruition that equip us to offer guidance regarding the methods of estate planning that work best for our clients.
Because estate planning is multi-disciplinary -- it frequently requires more than simply the preparation of a will or a trust -- we work closely with our Corporate Practice Group when your estate plan requires entity formation or business succession planning and with our Real Property Practice Group when the planning calls for unique treatment of a client’s real estate.
The Estate Planning, Trusts and Probate Practice Group's areas of experience include:
- Last Will and Testaments, both simple and complex
- Revocable Trusts, including credit shelter and marital trusts
- Irrevocable Trusts, including Life Insurance Trusts
- Split Interest Trusts frequently used for gifting, among which are Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts and Qualified Personal Residence Trusts
- Qualified Domestic Trusts
- Use of entities such as Limited Partnerships and Limited Liability Companies in estate planning
- Probate and Estate Administration
- Trust Administration
- Fiduciary accounting
- Estate and trust disputes and litigation
- Federal estate, gift and generation skipping taxation
- Preparation of Federal Estate Tax (Form 706) and Federal Gift Tax (Form 709) returns
- Charitable trusts, including charitable remainder annuity trusts, charitable remainder unitrusts and charitable lead trusts