Trusts and Estates

Our Trusts and Estates professionals bring deep experience and close "hands on" attention to planning and administering our clients’ estates and trusts. In addition to domestic planning, we offer international and transnational estate planning and wealth organization for U.S. persons with substantial assets abroad, non-U.S. persons with substantial assets in the United States, and non-U.S. persons of substantial means who plan to become U.S. tax residents or domiciliaries.

We reduce the impact of taxation on the transfer of wealth from generation to generation and the preservation of family owned businesses by working with members of the firm's tax, pension, real estate and corporate departments. We use all available tax planning tools, including family limited partnership formation, life insurance trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts and unitrusts, qualified personal residence trusts, private annuities, intentionally "defective" grantor trusts, self-canceling installment obligations, private foundations, and charitable lead and remainder trusts. 

Recognizing that tax reduction is often just one concern of many, our attorneys are sensitive to the needs of clients dealing with challenges arising from remarriages, the conflicting or merely different interests of beneficiaries and the need to provide for the young, elderly and disabled.

We represent individual and corporate executors and trustees in connection with the administration of trusts and estates, assisting sometimes inexperienced fiduciaries in the performance of their duties. Those services include post-mortem income tax planning, representation in state and federal estate tax proceedings, and matters involving the disposition of assets. We take pride in our ability to efficiently and economically administer estates and to provide knowledgeable counsel to trustees of testamentary and lifetime trusts.

We also advise clients regarding deferred charitable giving, and represent directors and officers of charitable corporations and foundations and trustees of charitable trusts.  

The senior members of the department are widely known authors and lecturers on estate planning subjects, with emphasis on gift, estate and generation-skipping transfer taxation and the income taxation of trusts and estates.