Wealth Preservation

Located in Palo Alto, Miller Law Group, P.C. provides wealth preservation services to clients throughout California. Our goal is twofold: (1) to establish a legal roadmap (the "Estate Plan") for a client that sets forth short term, intermediate term, and long term strategies which can be used as a continuing reference tool and guide alerting the client to potential opportunities to protect and grow assets, and minimize income and estate taxes; and (2) to implement in the short term, those strategies that further the client's goals, in the context of the client's budgetary requirements. In furtherance of these objectives, we devise strategies for:

• Asset protection
• Building family wealth
• Estate tax minimization
• Business succession
• Intergenerational transfer
• Higher education and retirement savings
• Valuation and financing strategies
• Exit strategies
See our Representative Cases page for a summary of some actual assignments we have completed for our clients.

Business Succession Planning

MLG lawyers assist with matters that reflect the integration of business and family wealth issues. For example, business owners may look ahead to the day when they pass the torch to either a family member or trusted employee, and seek advice with regard to business succession planning. We structure tax saving strategies to facilitate the orderly transfer of control and wealth to successive generations, including limited partnerships, limited liability companies, buy/sell agreements, gifts of fractionalized interests and sales to intentionally defective grantor trusts.

Estate Planning and Tax Planning

We prepare comprehensive, tax-sensitive estate planning documents individually tailored to each client. Our attorneys help clients formulate and establish revocable living trusts and certificates of trust, wills, springing durable powers of attorney for financial management, and advance health care directives. We help married couples establish property status agreements, assignments in trust of personal effects, and residential grant deeds transferring title in trust.

Tax planning is an inherent part of wealth preservation, and we advise our clients on estate planning strategies to minimize income, gift, estate, and generation-skipping transfer taxes. Our attorneys also advise clients regarding gifting strategies and the use of irrevocable trusts, such as charitable remainder and lead trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts and qualified personal residence trusts.

Asset Protection Planning

We advise high-net worth individuals regarding the use of irrevocable trusts for children, including multi-generational “dynasty” trusts and trusts naming a third-party “special trustee” or “trust protector”; special needs trusts for children with disabilities; corporate entities; life insurance trusts; family limited partnerships and limited liability companies.

Probate Administration, Trust Administration

Our attorneys have extensive experience in probate administration and trust administration, including the administration of large, complex estates involving federal estate tax and generation-skipping transfer taxes, estates involving multiple interests in real estate or business interests, and estates involving assets located in multiple states.

Trust and Estate Litigation

We represent trustees, executors, administrators, conservators, beneficiaries and heirs in all manner of probate, conservatorship, trust and estate disputes, including will contests and other challenges to the validity of an estate planning documents, allegations of a breach of fiduciary duty, disputes over accountings or entitlement to property, and intra-family conflicts.

Seek Professional, Creative Representation

Understanding the appropriate use of these mechanisms and how to implement these techniques to ensure compliance with all of the minutiae imposed by the tax laws is an important skill we bring to our clients, and is essential to realizing current tax savings, the efficient transfer of wealth to future generations, while protecting the needs and wants of the present generation.

For more information about protecting and building both personal and business net worth, please contact Miller Law Group, P.C.