Trust & Estates

Integrated legal solutions to protect your family’s wealth

Our Trusts & Estates Group concentrates on four main practice areas: estate planning, trust and estate administration, representation of fiduciaries in an advisory capacity, and trust and estate litigation. Our estate planning services include comprehensive planning, preparation and implementation of trusts, wills and other appropriate documents, while balancing our clients’ interest in limiting estate and gift taxes with their overall financial and family needs in the process. In the trust and estate administration area, we help manage decedents' trusts and estates representing the decedents' personal representatives in collecting assets and reporting and managing estates taxes, and making final distribution to beneficiaries. We counsel institutional and individual fiduciaries, as personal representatives, and we represent family members and charitable institutions so they can understand, undertake and enforce their rights and obligations. In the event a dispute arises, we have the trust and estates litigation experience necessary to effectively represent our clients.

We work closely with wealthy families and individuals to provide a coordinated, full-service approach to managing the legal issues affecting their businesses and families. In collaboration with the firm’s Corporate & Business lawyers, we serve as the family’s general counsel, advising our clients and their businesses as they create, grow, manage, preserve and dispose of their wealth. While the Corporate & Business lawyers focus on growing and improving your business, we focus on how the business success will affect your family.

The Brownstein Advantage

• All-inclusive business-personal solution. Why deal with multiple firms when Brownstein can provide an integrated business-personal solution? Our Trust & Estates Group can function as your family’s general counsel, quarterbacking efforts to protect and extend your family’s prosperity. We collaborate with Brownstein’s other practice groups to provide comprehensive planning for your family’s future.
• Strong tax background. Trust and estate planning involves complex tax issues of all varieties that cross state and international borders. Our group includes lawyers with decades of experience understanding how tax laws affect multi-generational wealth transfers. We can employ sophisticated techniques to allow you to dispose of your wealth as you see fit while minimizing the estate and gift tax implications of doing so. 
• Sophisticated legal services with a family-friendly approach. Estate planning involves dynamic, complicated areas of the law that intersect with the personal issues that arise when dealing with family matters. We believe that it is important for us to understand the inter-personal relationships involved and provide effective counsel that is sensitive to your unique situation. This means we do more than just look at your financial statement and then draft a Will or Trust. We look at your specific needs and customize a solution for you and your family. 
• Financial structuring for asset optimization. When designing an estate plan, we help our clients organize and structure their business and investment assets in a way that makes sense both for now and for the future. While we are not investment advisers, we will take a comprehensive look at your overall financial portfolio and advise on how to structure entities for the highest benefit. 
• Experience. Our group includes a certified specialist in taxation law and a certified specialist in estate planning, trust and probate law. Our lawyers hold master’s degrees in tax law and advise in estate planning, and have served as officers in successful businesses and family offices. We have decades of combined experience working with entrepreneurial individuals to integrate their estate and business plans. Our experience leads to quality and, from your perspective, peace of mind.