Estate Planning

We're eager to help you.

Most people, regardless of the extent of their assets, are concerned with developing a plan that will transfer their property at death. In fact, the development of such a plan is crucial to most families' long-term financial security. Clients come to us for the full spectrum of trust and estate issues including:

• Estate planning including: estate plans, wills, trusts, durable powers of attorney,
  advance directives for health care
• Sophisticated estate and gift planning strategies including: family limited
  partnerships, charitable lead and charitable remainder trusts, life insurance trusts,
  grantor retained annuity and unitrusts, qualified personal residence trusts and land
  conservation easements
• Business succession planning
• Tax planning, including charitable giving and tax-exempt organizations
• Administration of decedents' trusts and estates, including advising executors,
  personal representatives, and trustees, and by serving in those capacities directly
• Probate administration and litigation

Our attorneys are skilled at working with individuals and families, and our dedicated staff of paralegals assists us in delivering our services in a cost-effective manner.

Clients generally develop a working relationship with one attorney, who becomes closely familiar with your personal situation. Our attorneys, however, are not a collection of sole practitioners. We regularly collaborate with one another to produce the best result for our clients. In that process, we draw on each other's knowledge and experience, derived over many years of practice, in addressing complex, novel or challenging matters for our clients.

Where appropriate, we also work with lawyers from other practice areas when their expertise is relevant. Some frequent examples of this involve joint efforts with the corporate group in business succession matters, and co-counseling in contested probate matters with members of our litigation group. When you engage our estate planning group for trust and estate services, you can be assured that the full resources of the firm
will be available to provide whatever assistance is needed with respect to your legal matter.