Our trust and estates practice have mainly focused on high net worth family and individual clients, including U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and nonresident aliens. Our services include providing legal assistance in planning the transnational and generational transfer of wealth by our clients into or from the U.S.; inheritance of family wealth in the U.S., China, or other countries and territories; and in addressing their income tax, transfer tax, FBAR and FATCA reporting and compliance issues arising from change of their immigrant status. Based upon our clients’ objectives, we work with clients to help them achieve their goals with respect to wills and trusts, charitable giving, family-owned business succession planning, and international estate planning. Our lawyers regularly consult with one another within the firm or with other partnering firms to take advantage of our collective experience to provide the benefits of the collective knowledge to address a diverse range of situations.

We produce most basic estate-planning documents for clients according to their requirements and objectives, or draft and/or revise estate-planning documents for clients in accordance with changes to family members. We further provide legal consultation to clients on tax filings for foreign gifts and for inheritance and disposition of foreign assets. For advanced estate-planning work, we often act as a legal consultant or co-counsel with other attorneys for clients and are in close collaboration with financial advisors, accountants, and trust companies to provide the services clients need, to provide practical and results-oriented solutions to clients’ legal, tax, accounting and administrative problems, and to implement clients’ estate planning strategies.

Our services include the following documents:

·         Wills

·         Financial power of attorney

·         Healthcare power of attorney

·         Family living trust

·         Revocable trust

·         Irrevocable trust

·         Irrevocable life insurance trust

·         Special needs trust

·         Other types of trust documents

Because real estate makes up a significant portion of family wealth in Chinese families, we also produce and/or record the following legal documents related to a family’s transfer of wealth or inheritance.  Additionally, we provide legal and tax advice to our clients on how to effectively structure and plan in order to optimize Washington state transfer tax, as well as federal gift tax, estate tax, and income tax, including:

·         Change of real estate ownership from community property to separate property and vice versa

·         Change of real estate ownership from individually owned to corporate-owned or from corporate-owned to shareholder-owned

·         Complete or partial gift ownership of real property to another person

·         Change of ownership of real property from a grantor to a trust or change ownership of real property from trust-owned to grantor-owned

·         Removal of an owner from the real property deed (such as quit claim)

·         Transfer of real property ownership upon death

·         Lack of probate affidavit

The love and affection of Chinese parents for their children are also reflected in their financial support for their child’s purchase of real estate.  One practical concern when our clients’ child plans to start a family is how our clients can safeguard the assets that they give to their child and ensure that the assets remain as the separate property of their child even after their child’s marriage and are not subject to distribution in the event of their child’s divorce.  We provide strategies and draft relevant asset-protecting legal documents for clients with such concerns and needs.  We also draft, review, revise, and/or provide legal services related to pre-nuptial agreements, post-nuptial agreements, and divorce settlement agreements.

Our firm also provides probate and estate disposition legal services to our clients, especially our clients with cross-border assets, and can work with our clients’ accountants to report applicable federal and Washington state estate taxes.