Publications
How New Trust Laws Are Leaving Wealthy Families Unprotected
A new generation of trusts where beneficiaries may never learn of their interests, trustees face minimal liability for mismanagement, and family businesses can be gutted without legal recourse. These aren’t hypothetical risks—they’re features explicitly authorized by state law.
The erosion of fiduciary duties represents a critical moment for trust law and family wealth planning. Whether this moment leads to the collapse of trust as a meaningful legal instrument or to the evolution of more sophisticated, resilient governance structures will depend on the choices made by settlors, trustees, beneficiaries, and policymakers in the coming years.
What Families Should Be Asking Their Estate Planners In 2026
Can Your Trust Structure Survive What's Coming? For families, trust design is everything. The right trust in the right state can protect millions; the wrong structure can create tax disasters or leave assets vulnerable. Can Your Trust Structure Survive What's Coming?
Are Your Business Assets and Retirement Accounts Optimally Structured?
Which QSBS strategies will survive if Congress cracks down?
Do your legacy life insurance trusts reflect today's reality?
Yvon Chouinard And The Patagonia Purpose Trust— What Is It And Will It Work?
The Patagonia Perpetual Trust and the non-profit Holdfast Collective is, in my opinion, and elegant strategy to achieve Yvon Chouinard’s, and his family’s, objectives. Though the Purpose trust they will be able to ensure the succession of the management of the company and, hopefully, its profitable existence for decades to come as well as a high level of satisfaction for all of the stakeholders in the company. Through the Collective, those public policy and charitable purposes of Chouinard will benefit from the profits of the company. The only one who loses will be the government, since if the entire $3 billion value of the company was taxable Chouinard’s estate would owe $1.6 billion, or more if after 2025, in federal estate taxes.
Forbes Summer 2022 Article Summary
A summary of topics discussed in Forbes over the summer of 2022. Topics include; Cryptocurrency Taxation Changes, Expatriation, Mental Health in Estate Planning, and Trusts in the age of the Inflation Reduction Act.
New Reporting Requirements On Cryptocurrency, Nonfungible Tokens And Other Digital Asset Transactions.
The U.S. Senate has passed the “Build America Act of 2021” also known as the bipartisan infrastructure bill, that includes new reporting for cryptocurrency transactions and brokers of cryptocurrency…the Bill means that estate plans including any sort of digital asset in an estate will become more complicated.
Lessons To Be Learned From Failed Celebrity Estates
If you have an Estate Plan in place, this is a good time to review your existing documents to make sure they still accomplish your wishes. Here are the questions you should think about:
Does your Will match your wealth transfer wishes?
Are your assets titled correctly, and have you set up the appropriate beneficiary designation forms?
Have you established and funded all necessary Trusts? …
The Challenge Of Trustee Selection
The most challenging decision an estate planner must make is who to recommend as a trustee for a client. Trusts execute the estate plan, and the trustee is the lynchpin of any trust. The trustee plays multiple roles; a financial and ministerial role; they are responsible for the prudent investment of assets as well as administrative and executive duties of overseeing the trust; the role of consigliere to the family, a trusted advisor and counselor willing to argue with the client when needed, without ambition and giving dispassionate advice