All Practice Areas
Estate Planning
From wills and advance directives to trusts and wealth preservation, every plan is designed around your family's specific needs and goals.
Services
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Every service is designed for your situation. Expand any area below to see what it covers.
Benefits
- Autonomy: Ensures your specific medical and end-of-life decisions are respected, not guessed at by others.
- Dignity: Prevents unnecessary medical interventions that may align with hospital policy but not your values.
- Relief for Loved Ones: Removes the burden of making agonizing decisions from your grieving family members.
- Guardianship Prevention: Prevents a court from appointing someone you do not know to make decisions about your life and finances.
- Medical Access: Gives your chosen agents legal authority to talk with doctors and access your records without HIPAA roadblocks.
Benefits
- Parental Control: Allows you—not a judge—to appoint the Guardian who will raise your minor children.
- Asset Distribution: Clearly specifies who gets what, preventing confusion and family arguments over your belongings.
- Executor Choice: Lets you choose someone you trust to handle the settlement of your estate, rather than having the court pick.
- Orderly Distribution: Transforms a potentially chaotic statutory process into a structured, legally enforceable plan.
Benefits
- Skip Probate: Your family avoids the time, expense, and public nature of probate court entirely.
- Privacy: Keeps your financial information and beneficiaries private, not part of the public court record.
- Incapacity Protection: Allows your successor trustee to manage your finances immediately if you become unable to, without court involvement.
- Conditional Distributions: Lets you specify when and how beneficiaries receive their inheritance—like at certain ages or milestones.
- Seamless Transition: Ensures your assets stay properly managed and invested during the transition after your death.
Benefits
- Avoids the “Empty Trust” Problem: Most trusts fail because they’re never funded — we ensure yours actually holds your assets.
- Real Estate Transfers: We prepare, execute, and record deeds to transfer your home and other property into your trust.
- Account Retitling: We coordinate with banks, investment firms, and financial institutions to properly retitle your accounts.
- Business Asset Integration: We transfer your LLC interests, corporate stock, and/or business ownership into your trust structure.
- Beneficiary Coordination: We help align retirement account and life insurance beneficiary designations with your overall trust plan.
- Probate Prevention: We ensure assets are properly titled to actually avoid probate, not just on paper.
- Future Asset Guidance: We provide clear instructions for titling future acquisitions so your plan remains effective.
Benefits
- Risk Separation: We help separate personal assets from business or professional liability exposure so they remain protected.
- Florida Law Advantages: We maximize Florida’s protective laws, including homestead exemption and tenancy by entireties.
- Creditor Barriers: We help create legal structures that make it difficult for creditors to reach your hard earned assets.
- Inheritance Protection: We structure inheritances so they stay protected from your beneficiaries’ creditors and divorces.
- Proactive Planning: We implement protection before risks arise — planning after a claim may be too late.
- Integrated Strategy: We coordinate with your business structure and estate plan to ensure comprehensive protection.
Benefits
- Legal Protection: We provide advice and draft documents to protect the trustee from personal liability by ensuring all legal duties are properly fulfilled.
- Neutral Guidance: We act as a professional buffer to resolve conflicts and manage expectations among beneficiaries.
- Speed & Efficiency: We help expedite the distribution of assets to beneficiaries.
Benefits
- Family Protection: We ensure your family receives the full value of your business interest without being forced into management roles.
- Business Continuity: We prevent disruption to the business and protects jobs, vendor relationships, and customer confidence.
- Estate Tax Minimization: We structure business transfers to reduce or eliminate estate taxes on your business value.
- Buy-Sell Agreements: We create binding agreements that determine who buys your interest, at what price, and under what circumstances.
- Disability Planning: We address what happens if you become incapacitated and cannot run the business.
- Liquidity Solutions: We ensure funds are available (often through life insurance) to buy out your interest without burdening the business.
- Integration with Estate Plan: We coordinate business succession with your overall estate plan so everything works together.
Benefits
- Tax Minimization: We help minimize federal and state estate and gift taxes through legal and tax strategies.
- Advanced Trust Structures: We implement sophisticated tools like Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts (ILITs), Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts (GRATs), Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts (SLATs), and Charitable Remainder Trusts (CRTs) to accomplish your goals tax-efficiently.
- Strategic Gifting: We use gifting strategies that transfer wealth during your lifetime while minimizing gift tax exposure.
- Estate Tax Reduction: We structure your estate to take advantage of exemptions, deductions, and tax-saving techniques.
- Multi-Generational Planning: We create trusts that benefit children and grandchildren while protecting assets from estate taxes at each generation.
Benefits
- Foreign National Planning: Estate planning for non-U.S. citizens residing in Florida, addressing unique U.S. estate and gift tax exposure.
- Pre-Immigration Planning: We help advise foreign nationals planning to move to the United States on structuring assets before U.S. residency to minimize future tax exposure.
- U.S. Tax Analysis: We advise on how your foreign-held assets will be treated under U.S. estate and gift tax law once you become a U.S. resident.
- Expatriate Planning: Estate planning for U.S. citizens living abroad who need to plan their U.S. estate and understand U.S. tax implications.
- Tax Treaty Application: We review and interpret international tax treaties to reduce or eliminate double taxation where applicable.
- Non-Citizen Spouse Solutions: We address special planning requirements when one spouse is not a U.S. citizen, including Qualified Domestic Trusts (QDOT).
- Coordination with Foreign Counsel: We collaborate with other professionals and your foreign attorneys to ensure your U.S. and foreign planning align.
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