Practice Areas

At a minimum, estate planning involves the creation of a will and revocable trust to direct the disposition of wealth upon death, and preparing for possible incapacity with financial powers of attorney and advance health care directives.  At Birchstone Moore, we go beyond these basic documents and stress-test the plan, identifying potential vulnerabilities by mapping out how the client’s assets will flow through the plan, what the tax implications will be, and how we can better protect against potential creditors and predators.

Most of our clients have taxable estates at the federal and, where relevant, state levels.  We educate our clients on the transfer tax system (which consists of the estate, gift and generation-skipping transfer taxes) and provide thoughtful, practical ideas for reducing the tax burden through the generations.  We gauge our clients’ comfort level with complexity and are careful to match the plan with the client’s capacity for change.

Income taxes play a role in estate planning too, and many of the techniques we use allow for opportunities to save state and federal income taxes with grantor trusts, charitable giving techniques, and careful jurisdictional planning.

In today’s increasingly litigious and scam-riddled society, the use of trusts and proper titling of assets can provide important protection from creditors and predators.  At Birchstone Moore, we seek to protect clients’ wealth by employing both simple and sophisticated asset protection techniques.  Asset protection is also important when entering into a new relationship, regardless of whether it is romantic or strictly business.  We draft premarital agreements, cohabitation agreements, and partnership and shareholder’s agreements to protect our clients.

Many of our clients are successful entrepreneurs.  We help them share the upside on new ventures with their descendants at little to no gift and estate tax cost through techniques such as GRATs, sales to grantor trusts, dynasty trusts and more.

For our business owner clients, we ensure there is a plan in place for the succession of that business in the event of our client’s death or incapacity.  We are experienced at planning for business succession using buy-sell agreements, life insurance, and other techniques.  Where less than all of the client’s children are interested in continuing the business, we have ideas for how to make sure all the children are treated fairly.

The key to ensuring that wealth is properly preserved and deployed through multiple generations is communication and education.  Many of our clients are first-generation wealth builders, who were not themselves raised in a world of family offices or sophisticated tax and estate planning.  Not only do we share resources with our clients on using their wealth for good through philanthropy and education, but we lead family meetings with our clients and their children to train the next generation to be excellent stewards of the family legacy.  We encourage the use of ethical wills and acknowledge that estate planning is about more than transitioning wealth to the next generations – it is also about sharing the family’s values and secrets for success.

We are always saddened when a client loses a loved one, but we take comfort in helping to ease the burden.  At the death of a spouse, parent or other family member, we guide our clients through the daunting probate and estate administration process with compassion and efficiency. We file probate petitions, prepare inventories and accountings, transfer assets and handle federal and state estate tax returns.

Estate administration involves post-mortem tax planning, and we help our clients meet the deadlines for making important tax decisions, such as whether to claim a deceased spouse’s unused estate tax exemption, make a qualified terminable interest property trust (“QTIP”) election, or a reverse-QTIP election.  We analyze the financial outcomes of these different elections to help reduce income, estate and generation-skipping transfers taxes to the greatest extent possible.

Where our clients serve as trustee of a trust, we help them meet their fiduciary duties by preparing annual accountings and general advice on trust administration.