Trusts & Estates

Our trust and estate 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 handle most basic estate-planning work for clients, including providing advice and preparing legal documents for wills, financial power of attorney, health care power of attorney, family living trust, irrevocable life insurance trusts, spousal lifetime access trust, and other types of trust documents catering to clients’ requirements and objectives. 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.