Estate planning is an essential component of an individual's financial life. Clients of any age who wish to direct the disposition of their property and maximize the amount of assets passing to loved ones must consider the benefits of an estate plan.

Planning for the transfer of wealth involves many important aspects of the law and requires highly specialized tax skills. Many people are unaware of the heavy impact of estate taxation and thus fail to recognize the need for competent and creative advice.

Our experienced specialists offer a wide range of estate planning, trust and probate services to our clients. We prepare wills and trusts, including living trusts, life insurance trusts, charitable trusts, minor's trusts and other special-needs trusts. We also provide counsel on how to preserve assets from catastrophic, long-term health care costs and furnish sophisticated life time and post-mortem income tax planning.

In this era of rapid medical advancement, clients are increasingly interested in signing durable powers of attorney for both health care and asset management to carry out their wishes regarding medical treatment and financial transactions during periods of incapacity. We are able to advise clients with respect to these matters and to prepare the necessary documents. We also provide advice regarding the administration of conservatorships.

Although we serve clients whose wealth originates from many sources and types of endeavors, we have highly specialized expertise in serving the complex needs of our clients in the entertainment industry. In this respect, we provide such needed, and often critical, services to those clients for whom the firm provides many other broad-ranging services. We are particularly skilled at handling complex estates, such as those encompassing several types of wealth and property, including long-term contractual income rights and intellectual property.

Planning is the operative word in this specialty. Survivors or beneficiaries of persons who disregard the estate planning process and die without a properly formed program often find that the wealth that should be theirs has eroded substantially. Planning is particularly important to safeguard the interests of children. The planning process should begin early to protect assets and should be reviewed and reevaluated as the size, value and complexity of those assets grow.

In the past, estate planning was considered to be a concern only of the elderly. But today individuals learn at a much earlier age that they need to engage in the estate planning process to ensure that their goals are met and that the unexpected does not have a catastrophic effect on their survivors and beneficiaries.

A proper estate plan is a plan for living that includes family-wide financial implications. Its principal goal is the orderly transfer of wealth from one generation to the next. There are many components of an estate plan, all of which must be implemented to meet the goal of asset and income preservation and to create appropriate liquidity when needed to satisfy tax obligations, without threatening the estate as a whole.

Estate planning is a dynamic process that requires monitoring by a team of specialists in tax and estate law, fiduciary accounting, asset management and insurance, led by the attorney who coordinates and oversees these matters.

Above all, a sound and effective estate plan deals with intensely personal matters. Estate planning, therefore, requires the concern of a knowledgeable and caring attorney who will create the plan to meet the client's personal and financial goals, while always keeping in mind that the project involves "people" and not just "dollars."

Rosenfeld, Meyer & Susman, LLP is proud to offer the services of sensitive and competent professionals who are trained to address financial and personal concerns in the first instance and as they change over time.

9601 Wilshire Boulevard
Suite 710
Beverly Hills, California
90210-5288

Telephone:
(310) 858-7700
Facsimile:
(310) 860-2430