Practice Areas & Industries: Kaye Scholer LLP

Practice/Industry Group Overview

Kaye Scholer LLP's Trusts and Estates practice, based in both the New York and West Palm Beach offices, represents high net-worth individuals and fiduciaries, corporate fiduciaries and charitable organizations in a broad array of areas.

Areas of representation include:

• estate planning, including the drafting of wills and trust agreements;
• tax planning with respect to gift, estate, and generation-skipping transfer taxes;
• retirement planning;
• administration of estates and trusts;
• litigation of all phases of contested estates and trusts matters;
• charitable planning, including private foundations;
• dual-residence planning;
• prenuptial and postnuptial agreements.

We have vast experience in complex planning with all types of assets, including closely-held businesses, commercial and residential real estate, art collections, and hedge fund and private equity interests.

Services Available

We help our clients minimize and defer tax exposure by drafting and implementing a diverse range of revocable and irrevocable instruments, including life insurance trusts, charitable remainder and lead trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts, marital deduction trusts and disclaimers.

In connection with estate planning and the administration of estates and trusts, we prepare agreements among shareholders or partners to ensure the orderly disposition of a closely-held business. These agreements often deal with employment continuation and retirement benefits and buy-sell or stock redemption provisions.

Our lawyers frequently advise clients on philanthropic giving and how they may best achieve their goals in light of highly technical income, estate, gift and income tax provisions related to charitable gifts and bequests. We are involved early in the process in drafting pledge agreements, charitable remainder and charitable lead trusts and private foundations, and progress from the planning stages through the creation and administration of entities over a period of years while obtaining and preserving any tax-exempt status. We also advise public charities.

For clients and their families who are non-US citizens, we guide them through the thicket of special tax rules which often require sophisticated planning.

Estate administration involves the management and valuation of the decedent's assets, the continuation or disposition of closely held businesses and investments, the payment of debts and the filing of final income tax and gift tax returns. We prepare estate tax returns and handle estate tax audit examinations. We provide advice and counsel with regard to post-mortem planning opportunities such as the use of disclaimers, the timing of distributions and the deferment of tax payments.

Our Trusts and Estates Department consists of adept litigators, as well. We handle contested probate, spousal right of election, will construction and reformation and contested accounting and claims proceedings. Our lawyers often appear before the Internal Revenue Service and state departments of taxation.