TRUSTS, ESTATES AND FAMILY PLANNING: DESCRIPTION

The Trusts, Estates and Family practice of McKenna Long & Aldridge focuses on sophisticated wealth transfer issues and related tax counseling services. The firm has the capacity to draft estate planning documents in a cost-effective manner that permits us to serve clients with a range of wealth. However, the typical estate planning client is one with an estate that will benefit from a variety of tax-sensitive structures.

As a part of our tax counseling in these areas, we frequently prepare complex wills and revocable trusts as well as instruments to address specific wealth transfer situations. These include:

• Charitable trusts
• Children and grandchildren's trusts
• Family partnerships
• Grantor retained income trusts
• Irrevocable insurance trusts
• Limited liability
• Private annuities
• Qualified personal residence trusts
• Self-canceling installment obligations
• Tax-qualified conservation easements

Our lawyers also regularly advise clients in both estate planning for and distribution planning from tax qualified retirement plans and individual retirement accounts.

Since many of our estate planning clients are business executives or entrepreneurs, the Estate Planning practice includes pertinent areas of business law, such as partnership agreements, S Corporation trusts, buy-sell agreements, employment contracts, executive compensation and stock option plans.

As a natural extension of our Tax practice, MLA's estate planning services provide our clients with assistance in planned charitable giving as well as the creation of public and private foundations. Further, our lawyers have experience in the special gift and estate tax issues facing resident and nonresident aliens living in the U.S.

We counsel unmarried couples and gay and lesbian domestic partners concerning how to document their legal inter-relationship and to arrange their affairs through the preparation of appropriate documents. We prepare prenuptial and "Marvin" or "palimony" agreements, nominations of conservator preempting the normal statutory priority of right to serve and durable powers of attorney conferring agency powers and visitation rights upon non-family members. We also offer to unmarried couples wills and trusts specially crafted to define and maintain the financial inter-relationship, as well as their dispositive wishes.

McKenna Long & Aldridge is also active in trust and probate administration with the capacity to administer trusts and handle probate estates of any magnitude. We have experience in both court administrative proceedings related to probate and the preparation of federal and state gift, estate and fiduciary income tax returns.

In addition to the counseling areas of the trusts and estates practice, our lawyers also have experience in dealing with state and federal taxing bodies in both administrative and contested matters. The firm is particularly well suited to advise clients regarding contested matters and beneficiary disputes and to litigate those matters as necessary.