Estate Planning

Estate Planning is a concentration of law focused on planning not only for the disposition of assets upon an individual’s death but also the use and manipulation of those assets during an individual’s lifetime to ensure tax and administration efficiency. These dual goals and the diversity of assets and life circumstances our clients bring to us each day make our firm’s Estate Planning Practice a diverse, challenging, and extremely rewarding practice.

Estate Planning during our client’s lifetime include planning for mental incapacity, gifts during life, intra-family loans, charitable giving, marriage, divorce, blended family dynamics, utilization and preservation of retirement assets, and administration of family businesses. After death considerations we assess for our clients’ planning include the avoidance or streamlining of the Court’s Probate process, avoidance or minimization of state and federal wealth transfer taxes and capital gain taxes, and easing the administrative burden on a client’s fiduciaries.

Our attorneys develop Estate Plans that utilize Last Wills and Testaments, Revocable Trusts, Marital Trusts, Descendants Trusts, Irrevocable Gifting Trusts, Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts, and numerous additional trust instruments to accomplish these goals. Oram & Moss attorneys also encourage clients to execute Financial Powers of Attorney and Advanced Directives for Healthcare Decisions in order to allow for a seamless transfer of decision making authority to a trusted family member, friend, or advisor in the event of the client’s incapacity. We work directly with clients’ financial advisors, accountants, attorneys, and insurance professionals to help implement and administer the Estate Plans we’ve created for our clients.

While our top goal in serving our clients is to devise a robust, practicable estate plan that meets our clients’ needs, we also prioritize our clients’ understanding of their estate plan. We ensure that clients leaving our office understand the mechanisms of the planning that we’ve implemented and feel confident in how operate within their planning moving forward. Oram & Moss also makes it a priority to explain the current legislative landscape so that clients understand the relevant laws as they currently stand but also have a grasp of how the legal environment has changed over time and how it may continue to change in the future.