• Kramer Levin’s Individual Clients team helps clients preserve, manage and transfer their wealth in accordance with their wishes. With deep practical experience, technical skills and creativity, our lawyers tailor solutions to our clients’ estate planning issues based on their unique financial and personal circumstances.

    We represent individuals and their families, the businesses they own or control, and their family offices, individual and corporate fiduciaries, and charitable foundations. Our clients include those with estates passed down through generations, entrepreneurs with newly acquired wealth, investors, venture capitalists, business executives, real estate developers, entertainers and sports figures.

    Our team employs a multidisciplinary approach, collaborating with lawyers throughout the firm to provide holistic advice on trusts and estates; income and transfer tax planning; charitable gift planning; transfers of interests in public and privately held corporations, partnerships, LLCs and real estate ventures; disposition of interests in employee benefit plans; intellectual property; entertainment matters; and private and public charitable organizations. We also work closely with our clients’ other professional advisers — such as investment advisers, accountants, insurance experts, and local counsel — as well as with their executors, trustees and other fiduciaries in the administration of their estates and trusts. When necessary, our lawyers handle contested matters related to probate of wills, estates and trusts administration (including tax audits), and settlement of fiduciary accounts.

    We strive to design estate and business plans that both reflect our clients’ goals and provide flexibility to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. To this end, we utilize sophisticated techniques, including: 

    • Carefully tailored wills, revocable trusts and incapacity documents
    • Family limited partnerships and LLCs 
    • Generation-skipping trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs), life insurance, asset protection and other specialized trusts 
    • Charitable lead and remainder trusts 
    • Sales to grantor trusts 
    • Business and voting trusts and shareholders’ agreements 
    • Corporate reorganizations and recapitalizations 
    • International estate planning

    Our lawyers frequently speak and write on estate planning topics, with articles appearing in Estates, Gifts and Trusts JournalEstate PlanningTrusts & Estates Magazine; the New York Law Journal; and other publications.