Estate Planning Practice


Our Tax Practice Group offers considerable experience in the areas of estate, wealth transfer and asset protection planning. These services are part of our interdisciplinary approach to addressing our clients' business and personal needs. That is, while PFS offers legal counsel on a variety of business, financial and personal concerns, what distinguishes PFS is our understanding of how these matters overlap. We view each issue within the broader context of our client's unique values, objectives and dynamics, and then devise an integrated strategy that identifies and addresses the issues in a balanced fashion in order to advance our client's interests, including the minimization of income, estate, gift and generation-skipping transfer taxes.

We advise individuals on all aspects of personal tax planning, including income, estate and gift taxes and charitable giving. Depending on a client's personal situation, our services may include:

•   estate planning, including drafting and implementing wills, simple and complex trusts, such as revocable trusts, dynasty trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs), intentionally defective grantor trusts (IDGTs) and qualified personal residence trusts (QPRTs), and family limited partnerships and related services;
   
•   asset protection planning;

•  insurance planning, including the use of irrevocable insurance trusts;

•  gift planning;

•  advising on and creating charitable foundations;

•  counseling on probate administration and settlement of decedents' estates;

•  trust administration;

•  assisting with guardianship matters; and

•  dealing with the Internal Revenue Service.

We also counsel business owners on all areas of tax and estate planning. In addition to general planning and counseling assistance, some of our specific services include:

•  preparing buy/sell, restrictive stock and employment agreements ;

• structuring life insurance and benefit programs to minimize tax costs (including "split-dollar" arrangements);
   
• planning for management succession and asset conservation through multiple generations at the minimum tax cost;
   
•   counseling on recapitalizations, gift programs and other techniques for shifting value during an owner's lifetime or separating control from value;
   
• counseling on the short- and long-term estate implications of selling or restructuring a business; and
   
• planning for liquidity in the event of an owner's death, including structuring life insurance programs.

 


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