Your why determines
the how.
What has motivated you to build your wealth? Why have you made the sacrifices you’ve made to achieve your success? Answers to questions like this begin to define the “why” of your story. How should your story evolve and resonate ten, twenty, or a hundred years from now? How will your vision for your legacy create the change you imagine? If we don’t take the time to understand your why, we can’t create the how.
We believe in the power and value of your legacy. To be your indispensable partner in the creation of your legacy, we need to bring more than just smarts to the table. Our team possesses deep, multifaceted experience in estate planning, inheritance preservation, asset protection, privacy planning, and international tax planning.
Our collaborative, educational approach is designed to help you fully understand the essence of the legal strategies that give life to your legacy. When your planning is a manifestation of your why, your legacy comes to life and will endure for generations.
We believe you should have the freedom to control your wealth and your decisions. Your WHY must determine the HOW of your story. It is, after all, your story to tell.
Estate Planning
A successful estate plan is the last gift you can give to the most important people in your world.
Many people think you sign a stack of complicated documents, check “Estate Plan” off your list of things to get done, and then get on with life. While the legal documents are very important, a complete estate plan is a series of interrelated strategies we create collaboratively. Creating a successful estate plan is only possible through a process of first deeply understanding you, your story, and what’s most important to you. Only then can we design and implement the right series of strategies to effectively protect and preserve your legacy during your lifetime and ultimately pass your legacy into future generations.
After all, estate planning isn’t just about dying gracefully. While that’s certainly part of the process, comprehensive estate planning must contemplate much more. For example:
Preserving and protecting your wealth against threats from predators
Maximizing your privacy to allow you to enjoy your wealth with minimal interference
Creating tax leverage for highly-appreciated assets
Preparing and educating your heirs in advance so they can mature into shared decision making
A comprehensive estate plan addresses these issues and many more, regularly tailored to your vision and your priorities over time. Because everything in your life—both internally and externally—constantly evolves, your estate plan must be reviewed and actively maintained.
If you’ve never created an estate plan, or if your plan hasn’t been reviewed in a while, we can help you design and implement a series of strategies that honor your life’s work and protects the people you care most about.
Let’s get started.
Asset Protection
It’s no secret that we live in an extremely litigious society. The American legal system is set up in a way that makes it easy to sue with no economic risk to plaintiffs. As a result, entrepreneurs and innovators, doctors, lawyers, architects, athletes, and other professionals and affluent individuals can be attractive prey. Asset protection strategies help proactively build defenses against frivolous lawsuits, helping you preserve the legacy you’ve worked hard to build.
We design and implement strategies that provide privacy and security today and preserve assets for future generations. Whether the strategy requires planning techniques in other states or in offshore jurisdictions, we help you understand your options and then design and implement appropriate strategies tailored to your objectives.
Asset protection can be as straightforward as establishing a robust corporate veil through carefully designed LLCs (in strategic jurisdictions, not Colorado or California), structuring protective trusts for a spouse, for children or future generations, or creating “self-settled” asset protection trusts under favorable domestic or international jurisdictions.
Cryptoasset Wealth Planning
Cryptoassets like bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs, and others have transformed the concept of value and wealth on a global scale, but these innovative assets are uniquely challenging to deal with in an estate plan. Crypto owners must not only effectively manage asset custody during their lives, but they must also securely manage the transition of their cryptoassets when they become incapacitated and after they die.
Cryptoassets also often generate significant state and federal capital gains tax liability that can be mitigated or eliminated with careful planning. We blend strategies from the most attractive domestic and international jurisdictions to help individuals and families with cryptocurrencies or other cryptoassets reduce their tax footprint and provide significant privacy and protection in the process. (And yes, we proudly accept payment in bitcoin (BTC).
International Planning
The American dream is alive and well, and the U.S. remains one of the strongest, most secure economies in the world. As a result, many wealthy individuals from other countries seek to invest in U.S. businesses, educate their children in American schools, and buy real estate in the United States.
With significant changes in international law, the U.S. has become a privacy haven for the world. With a stable, diverse economy and with many other nations now sharing bilateral information (the U.S. doesn’t), many wealthy non-U.S. individuals continue to invest in U.S. companies, real estate, and other assets. Others, like professional athletes and entertainers, relish privacy and want to minimize their tax footprint. With strategic planning in advance, we can dramatically reduce the impact of U.S. tax on a family’s global holdings in highly secure, highly private strategies.
If this is you, welcome! Let us help you plan in advance and minimize the huge tax impact that you’ll face if you don’t work with us early. We work with individuals and families from all over the world to both minimize taxes and preserve their privacy.
Business Planning
Almost 98% of all businesses in the United States are small businesses. And behind those small businesses is an entrepreneur driven by a passion to make an impact. We know, because we’re small business owners, too. The business you’ve built—or the next one you’re going to build—needs to be built for long-term success: not just for today, but well into the future.
We take the time to get to know your industry, your business plan, your growth plans, and then we design and implement a legal and operating environment to set you up for success. We stay on top of many of the essential legal compliance issues as your company grows over time and, when the time comes to bring in outside investors or pass the business to a new generation of owners, we will help you build value in the company.
When the time comes to transition your business, we design and implement strategies that not only helps your business endure in the hands of new ownership, but also equips the next generation of leadership to succeed into the future. Our clients include other law firms and consulting groups, real estate management companies, hotel chain operators, vehicle dealerships, software and cloud app developers, blockchain project developers, and many more. We create integrated planning solutions that protect your business and because your business is among your most valuable assets, we build your estate plan around your business holdings as well.
Julia Cronin is a real star with an amazing grasp of the human details of an estate plan. We are especially grateful for the way she helped us plan for disabled siblings. In addition to her extraordinary grasp of the wide range of assets that should be catalogued and ability to produce legal language one can understand, she is infinitely patient and the master of the caring nudge. We recommend her highly.
M.M & D.M.