Our Estates & Trusts Group offers a wide array of experience and assistance in the areas of estate planning, estate and trust administration, and charitable giving. Our Estates & Trusts Group is one of the largest and most sophisticated of its kind in our area.

We work with our clients to develop estate plans that seek to maximize the preservation of wealth both during life and upon death, and that also seek to minimize the potential for future conflicts among heirs and other future stakeholders. This planning often includes advice on how to protect clients’ assets from erosion by death taxes, long-term care costs, and other future claims. While our planning is focused on individual wealth, much of our planning work is with entrepreneurs and investors, where we work with our Business & Finance Group to meld private wealth planning with business planning.

Our Group also spends a great deal of time assisting our client’s personal representatives (i.e., Executors, Trustees, Guardians, etc.) in the management of wealth transfer, helping them to administer decedents’ estates, trusts, and guardianships of minors or incapacitated persons.

This Group’s services include assistance for clients in the following areas:

• Asset Protection Planning
• Charitable Giving
• Elder Law & Medicaid Planning
• Estate Planning & Family Wealth Preservation
• Estate Planning for Non-Citizens and Expatriates
• Estate & Trust Administration
• Guardianships
• Planning for Individuals with Disabilities and Special Needs Trusts
• Planning for IRAs and Other Retirement Benefits
• Probate, Estate and Fiduciary Litigation

Our Estates and Trust practice area has a broad geographic range, representing clients in the Greater Philadelphia area and Bucks County and Montgomery County, and throughout Central Pennsylvania, Eastern Pennsylvania, Central New Jersey and South Jersey.

Our guardianship practice includes representation of family members in proceedings seeking guardians of adult incapacitated persons.  Often these matters are uncontested, and our representation consists primarily of helping the family member navigate the law and the court rules governing the appointment of guardian.  If the guardianship matter involves a contest, then the matter is generally handled in conjunction with the Litigation practice area.

Planning is the foundation of the Estates & Trusts practice area, and we spend much of our time designing and implementing comprehensive estate plans. This includes sophisticated planning, such as the formulation of complicated federal estate tax planning strategies, planning for the distribution of IRAs and other qualified retirement plans, and the development of ownership succession strategies for family business owners and other entrepreneurs.

We also assist with fundamental planning involving the drafting of Wills, Trusts, Powers of Attorney, and Living Wills. Whether a client’s wealth is significant or more modest, our planning may also include a focus on asset protection, which could include planning for the payment of long-term care and Medicaid availability for the elderly, setting up special needs trusts and other vehicles for the disabled, or working with high net worth clients to protect their assets from future claims. Our approach is to provide full-service solutions, handling all types and sizes of estates and trusts, and providing comprehensive tax planning as part of the estate plans.

Our more fundamental estate planning engagements typically involve the development of the following:

• Wills, and if appropriate, Revocable Trusts
• Powers of Attorney and Living Wills
• Beneficiary Designations for Life Insurance and Retirement Plans

More involved and sophisticated estate planning may involve the strategies using:

• Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts
• Funded Revocable Trusts
• Transfers of business interests and certain investment assets via Family Limited Partnerships (FLPs) and Family Limited Liability Companies (FLLCs)
• Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts (GRATs), Grantor Retained Unitrusts (GRUTs), and Grantor Retained Income Trusts (GRITs)
• Charitable Remainder Trusts and Charitable Lead Trusts
• Private Foundations
• Qualified Personal Residence Trusts (QPRTs)
• Sales and gifts to Irrevocable Grantor Trusts
• Domestic Asset Protection Trusts
• Limited Liability Companies and similar entities for family asset protection
• Qualified Domestic Trusts (QDOTs) for non-citizen spouses

Our estate and trust administration practice involves the administration of estates and trusts of all sizes. This includes representation of individual executors, administrators and trustees, as well as the largest of trust companies. When representing individual executors, administrators and trustees, our very experienced group of paralegals provide the core services, with the supervision of the attorneys in our Estates & Trusts Group.

When administering decedents’ estates, we work with the executor or administrator from the initial probate through final distribution, guiding the executor or administrator through the process. The work includes post-mortem tax planning, the maintenance of detailed fiduciary accountings, preparation of Federal and state estate and inheritance tax returns, assistance with the Decedent’s final income tax return and the estate’s fiduciary income tax returns, working with creditors, and settling the estate through distribution to the beneficiaries by agreement or by Court approval. Our representation also involves managing the interrelationship of non-probate property with the duties of the executor or administrator.

This practice area also handles the administration of all types of trusts, including assistance with the trust’s fiduciary income tax returns, as well as consultation in connection with the fiduciary’s duties under the trust instrument. The types of trusts can include credit shelter (or “bypass”) trusts, irrevocable life insurance trusts, intentionally defective grantor trusts, charitable remainder trusts, charitable lead trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs), grantor retained unitrusts (GRUTs), and grantor retained income trusts (GRITs).