Trusts & Estates

Burns & Levinson develops estate plans and administers trusts and estates for clients that protect and provide for the assets they’ve spent their lifetimes acquiring, growing and preserving. Among our specialties are planning for high net worth individuals and families with varied and complex assets, blended families, beneficiaries with special needs, heirloom real estate, and clients experiencing lifecycle transitions of all types, including divorce.

Few firms can match our expertise in planning for and administering estates and trusts holding family and closely-held businesses. We have over 55 years of experience addressing the demanding issues of management succession and ownership transfer with minimum conflict and maximum benefit.

Our attorneys create plans that integrate each individual client’s particular and unique goals for disposition of wealth, minimization of taxes, and prudent management and control. We use a strategic and multidisciplinary approach involving all aspects of tax, corporate, real estate, and family law, as well as probate, fiduciary and business litigation when necessary. We aim to address every detail of the client’s situation.

In both planning and the administration of estates and trusts, we often collaborate with clients’ financial advisors, such as trusted bankers, accountants and financial planners. Our lawyers are highly skilled at seeing the big picture, so we can coordinate, simplify and synergize the focused efforts of a client’s financial advisory team to ensure that goals are realized as collaboratively and efficiently as possible.

Our team has also earned an enviable reputation for advising fiduciaries, both professional and nonprofessional, on the many legal and ethical complexities confronting those who hold property for beneficiaries. Whether the issue is liability, accounting to beneficiaries, or interpreting the provisions of governing documents, we understand the complexities that challenge executors, guardians, conservators, trustees, and custodians as they deal with fiduciary responsibility and applicable law.