practice areas

General Estate Planning, including:

• Drafting revocable living trusts, for married couples, single persons, and domestic partners, including trusts designed to minimize estate taxes for married couples, and trusts designed to avoid probate and facilitate the distribution of assets for all clients.
  
• Drafting estate plans using wills as the primary estate planning document for clients not seeking to avoid probate or for whom probate is not applicable, as well as pour-over wills for use with trusts.
  
• Planning for families with young children, including trusts for support and education, and guardianship provisions.
  
• Preparation of  durable powers of attorney for asset management, advance health care directives, community property agreements and other property agreements.
  
• Analysis of client assets and discussion of  beneficiary designations, survivorship provisions, and other planning tools.
  
• Tax planning including estate tax planning and application of current estate tax exemptions and portability for married couples, gift tax planning, property tax planning including availability of parent-child exemptions from reassessment, and planning related to step-up in basis on death.

Probate, Trust Administration, and all post-death Administration of Estates, including:

• Trust administration on the death of the first spouse, including allocation of assets to subtrusts and subtrust funding, administration on the death of the second spouse including estate tax matters and distribution to beneficiaries, and administration of the single person trust. 
  
• Probate administration, including traditional probate, spousal property petitions, and small estate administrations, as well as a variety of probate court petitions. 
  
• All forms of post-death transfer of real property, including terminations of joint tenancy and affidavits of death of joint tenant, community property with right of survivorship terminations, distribution of property from trusts and probate estates, and attendant property tax matters.
  
• Estate tax matters, step-up in basis issues, and related post-death tax planning.