Effective estate and gift planning assures accumulated assets benefit the people and causes most important to our clients. At Nixon Peabody, we pay careful attention to assignment of beneficiaries, tax consequences and implications of planning decisions, asset protection strategies, and charitable giving priorities, employing a comprehensive approach to protecting wealth.
We offer clients the benefit of being fully integrated with a large, full-service corporate law firm, which offers advantages when handling estate issues that involve business assets. We partner with attorneys across the U.S. who are experienced with business entities, tax law, and bankruptcy. Together, we can develop structures for ownership and disposition of assets that minimize exposure and liability, or threats from potential creditors (e.g., accident and negligence claim, breach of contract, professional malpractice, creditor claims from a failed business, catastrophic medical bills, environmental liabilities, sexual harassment suits, divorce).
Estate and gift planning services include:
Wills and trusts: Preparation of a new will or trust, or review of existing plans. We understand the full spectrum of traditional and advanced vehicles for minimizing estate and gift taxes. We have significant experience resolving sensitive issues, such as family business succession, second marriages, or supporting dependents with special physical or emotional conditions.
Health care decision-making: Documentation that names an individual who can make health care and end-of-life decisions.
Financial power of attorney: Management of financial assets in the event of incapacity.
Lifetime family gifts: Innovative approaches to leveraging wealth transfer through:
- Inter-family sale techniques
- Family limited partnerships
- Grantor retained annuity trusts
- Qualified personal residence trusts
Charitable giving: Structuring of a plan that achieves charitable objectives. Advice on the tax implications of charitable gifts, and establishment of charitable entities, including private foundations and charitable trusts.
Asset protection: Planning to achieve our clients’ goals in the context of the nature and form of entities to hold assets to be transferred. Considerations are given to asset liquidity, the needs of our clients and their children, and the need for asset protection vehicles, such as a family limited partnership, or a limited liability company combined with a foreign offshore asset protection trust. We have experience with the full range of asset protection planning strategies including:
- Statutory exemption planning
- Transfers to spouse
- Co-ownership with spouse
- Domestic asset protection trusts featuring trust protector(s)
- Foreign asset protection trusts
- Gifts to family members and charities
- Entity selection
- Family limited partnerships and limited liability companies, advanced life insurance and annuity-based planning strategies