Wills, Trusts and Estates

We focus on the individual needs of our clients, emphasizing personalized planning rather than standardized packages. Our planning and administration services encompass the full range of economic wealth: real estate holdings, stock and bond portfolios, closely held partnerships and corporations, and significant employee benefits.

The trusts and estates practice ranges from routine wills to complex plans for large estates to special comprehensive estate planning for young professionals and executives. Areas of emphasis include gift, estate and generation-skipping tax planning; preparation of wills and trusts; administration of probate and trust estates; estate planning for the business owner; charitable and deferred giving (including private foundations); and representation of executors and trustees.

One specific area we devote our time and expertise to is charitable plans and charitable and deferred giving.

Many of the firm's clients have long-standing charitable giving programs that involve the utilization of sophisticated deferred giving vehicles. Our in-depth experience with charitable lead trusts, private foundations, and charitable remainder trusts has made it possible to provide our clients with outstanding legal advice and service in this area. Delegating a person to distribute charitable trust funds is great gift to community and the delegator. The charitable trust corpus can be invested and grow every year as the delegator contributes a small portion of trust assets to a foundation that has been chosen by settler or delegator.

Other specific services we provide include (but are not limited to):

• Tax planning
• Family asset distribution planning
• Nursing home expense planning
• Utilizing various tools such as chartable gifts, warranty deeds and spend thrift trusts to achieve familial economic goals
• Special needs trust
• Durable power of attorney
• Designation of health care surrogate
• Living Will
• Guardianship