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.