Areas of Practice - Trusts & Estates

Estate Planning
Maximize your assets

You’ve built family relationships, enjoyed a career, worked hard, sacrificed and saved for years. Now you want to pass on the maximum of assets to your family while minimizing the expense and tax consequences. You also want to distribute these assets, whether outright or in trust, in a manner that best serves your loved ones.

Depending on the size and complexity of your assets, there are various choices to plan your estate, from drafting a simple will or trust to structuring intrafamily or charitable transfers.

When analyzing your overall financial planning goals for retirement, education, or investment growth, we also consider estate planning. The firm’s trust and estate attorneys incorporate related areas of law (business planning and transfers, taxation, financial planning, and elder law) when complex matters involving estate planning need to be addressed.

Wills and Trusts

From simply retitling assets to preparing wills between a husband and wife to recommendations of lifetime trusts for the benefit of minor or special-needs children, we consider your intentions in conjunction with necessary tax planning. In addition to preparing your will or trust, we recommend advance directives - Power of Attorney, Health Care Proxy, and Living Will - as a part of your estate plan.

Planning tools

We seek to minimize Federal and New York Estate Tax while preserving assets and control within the family. Typically, our planning recommendations include wills, transfers, life insurance trusts, credit shelter trusts, disclaimers, family limited partnerships, buy/sell agreements, and lifetime gifting strategies.

Estate Administration-Probate

You’ve done your estate planning in order to preserve your assets. The goals are for you to enjoy life after retirement and for your beneficiaries to ultimately benefit from your legacy. We offer professional estate administrative services in the areas of probate, estate taxation and post-mortem tax and asset protection plans, insurance trusts, and inter vivos trusts. If the need should arise, we also can represent the estate in will contests and contested accounting proceedings.

Consider your future

You’ve created the assets. We help you hold and pass on what you’ve acquired in the manner most appropriate for your beneficiaries.