Business and Wealth Succession Planning

Overview

Experience

Our business clients have worked hard building their businesses. We are privileged to guide these clients through growth, preservation, and succession planning to ensure that their hard work isn’t wasted. Using a wide array of business, trust, estate, and tax planning tools and structures, our attorneys walk alongside business owners and their families to transition the company in custom-designed, tax-efficient ways to preserve the fruits of labor and ensure continuity of the business. We have worked with companies in many different industries ranging from service providers to manufacturers, farms to construction companies, and everything in between.

Of course, with successful businesses comes wealth. Such wealth is subject to complex taxation and at risk of loss to broken marriages, poor decisions, unforeseen events, creditors, and predators. We have seen a lot of these struggles during the course of our history, often helping clients react to what might have been prevented with thoughtful planning. We help our clients identify risks and opportunities, then proactively implement strategies to safely and smoothly transition wealth in ways that provide for future generations and the philanthropic causes closest to their hearts.

Examples of such strategies include:

  • Revocable trusts
  • Prenuptial and postnuptial agreements
  • Shareholder Agreements and Operating Agreements (Buy-Sell Agreements)
  • Sales to Intentionally Defective Irrevocable/Grantor Trusts (IDITs or IDGTs)
  • Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts (GRATs)
  • Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts (ILITs)
  • Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts (SLATs)
  • Charitable Remainder Trusts (CRUTs and CRATs)
  • Charitable Lead Trusts (CLUTs and CLATs)
  • Beneficiary Defective Inheritor’s Trusts (BDIT)
  • Family LLCs
  • Family Limited Partnerships (FLPs)
  • Voting trusts
  • Family charters or constitutions
  • Family policies (employment, philanthropy, etc.)

PROFESSIONALS