Practice Areas & Industries: Akerman Senterfitt

Practice/Industry Group Overview
Making Life Management Decisions

Whether you are starting out in life or preparing for retirement, the legal objectives in structuring your assets are largely related to tax minimization and management control. Myriad legal tools are at your disposal to protect and pass on your wealth. Fortunately, Akerman Senterfitt attorneys are versed in, and experienced with, every strategy within the law. In fact, through our active Government Practice, we helped write many of the statutes and administrative rules that govern this area of practice.

Unfortunately, many people fail to address issues concerning estates and their succession before it is too late. We are here to present our clients all their options, and to help them get the most out of life, with a minimum of worry over the future.

Services Available
Business Succession Planning

Do you own a business and want your children to benefit from its long-term viability? Perhaps some of your children want to make a life out of running your firm, but others are not suited to doing so. Whether the entity is a corporation, LLC, sole proprietorship, or other form of business, we can help you maintain family control while ensuring that all of your heirs benefit (in the proportions you prescribe) from its success.

In this situation, it is also critical that your estate be properly structured so that a transfer of assets will not overwhelm the liquidity available to satisfy estate taxes. Insurance, maintained outside the estate in an irrevocable insurance trust, is one possible solution. Or, if you are not insurable, we can show you how to gift the business over time to remove it from the estate's taxable base.

Partnership issues are also a factor. Should your business partner die, do you want to be in business with the partner's spouse? We can help you prepare agreements now that will avoid this and other potentially undesirable succession issues in the future.

To support our attorneys in this area, we can call upon the firm's Corporate Practice Group, to resolve other matters related to business organization or succession, no matter how complex or unusual.

Prenuptial and postnuptial agreements are important tools in the effort to manage family wealth and business interests. If you are the family head or business owner, you should be aware that such contracts are intended not only for your individual use. When your children or grandchildren marry, are you prepared for the dilution of assets, and perhaps loss of control over your business? And you should know that in order for existing agreements to maintain their validity they must be revisited periodically and as financial circumstances change.

Every such arrangement is a unique contract that takes into account the complex details of the parties' financial and personal situations.

The aging of our population has resulted in a rapidly growing and largely underserved need for attorneys who are knowledgeable in the laws that apply to the care and disposition of senior citizens. Akerman Senterfitt is one of the few large law firms with an attorney who is nationally recognized in this practice. Richard Milstein has spent many years developing an understanding of, and helping to craft, the applicable body of law.

Consider this common scenario. You are in your fifties and have parent(s) who have lost their ability to make decisions for themselves and to manage their financial affairs. You must place them, protect their assets, and secure needed medical and social services for them. Sometimes, you may feel that your parent(s) are being physically abused or financially manipulated. How do you manage the time consuming, often highly frustrating and bureaucratic process of protecting their interests and caring for them without having to neglect your own affairs and family?

Akerman Senterfitt is proud of its ability to represent your interests in such situations. We can advise and represent you in every aspect of these circumstances. If a guardian must be appointed, we are qualified and experienced in working with you through the process, and in the subsequent representation of the guardian, as required by law. What makes Akerman different from the typical large law firm is that we offer a broad-based practice in family law and also in probate and guardianship issues. This is critical in matters of elder care, because it lies at the crossroads between these areas.

When it comes to helping clients significantly reduce transfer taxes so that succeeding generations are able to receive significant wealth, few firms have the depth of experience of Akerman Senterfitt. In fact, one of our attorneys has chaired the Florida Bar's Real Property, Probate, and Trust Law Section seminar on estate planning for the last six years. This seminar covers changes in tax law, as well as innovative ways of maximizing opportunities provided by the law. It also gives Akerman attorneys access to the latest thinking in this area from leading attorneys nationwide.

Are you vested in a significant pension or profit sharing plan? Such assets can be subject to income and estate taxes upon liquidation, death, or transfer. In fact, it is not unusual for individuals who fail to take proper precautions to lose 70-80% of retirement plan benefits to taxes. Akerman Senterfitt is not only one of the state's most experienced firms in designing employee benefits programs, but also among the most knowledgeable in managing and protecting benefits from the executive's point of view.

Our skills go far beyond basic tax qualified plans to non-qualified, deferred compensation plans, stock option plans, and other employee incentive programs, many of which are extremely creative in structure.

As in other areas of the law, our involvement in The Florida Bar gives us unique perspectives on the laws that govern retirement assets and tax minimization. In fact, one of our attorneys chaired The Florida Bar's Trust Law Committee, which rewrote Florida's trust law, and another currently chairs The Florida Probate Rules Committee, which is rewriting the procedures for litigating in the probate division of the Circuit Court.

We can advise you on how and when to take distributions, designate beneficiaries, and pass along the maximum possible amount of your benefits in the event of a premature death.

Clients:
Moreland Management Company, Mudrick, Witt, Levy & Consor Reporting Agency, Inc. , Walden University, Inc.