Individual Clients

We specialize in providing comprehensive and highly personal legal services to affluent individuals and families, as well as their closely held companies. Although we are skilled in a number of disciplines related to these clients’ needs, we are best known for helping solve the unique and challenging problems they and their businesses face.

Our clients include some of Michigan’s most well-known families, as well as business owners, executives, athletes, and other professionals seeking to minimize the tax burden on their heirs, make significant charitable donations or complete complex personal transactions.

Our Services:

We are expert at handling all aspects of estate planning. This includes estate, gift, and income tax, probate, trusts, and trust disputes, the purchase and sale of real estate, and personal and business transactions where tax considerations are paramount. We take pride in our ability to structure these transactions for the maximum benefit of our clients without having to resort to the added expense of relying on outside attorneys or other professionals.

We are especially aware of our clients’ desires to preserve and transfer wealth through the careful administration of their trusts and estates. We optimize every tax advantage to that end. Where litigation is required to settle a claim against a trust or estate, we are able to provide the most experienced experts to deal with a breach of fiduciary duties, interpretations of wills and trusts, and disputes involving accountings.

We assist clients with highly personal matters, including the purchase and sale of art collections, personal aircraft, and large watercraft, always cognizant of the tax implications of any transaction. We also offer our services in the formation and administration of family offices.

We assist individual clients with:

• Estate, gift and income taxes
• Estate planning and probate matters
• Trusts and trust disputes
• Sales and purchases of real estate
• Transactions concerning personal art collections
• Purchases and sales of aircraft (including fractional ownership interests) and watercraft, along with all related tax aspects
• Significant personal and business transactions
• The formation and administration of family offices

Representative Matters:

 We have helped individual clients make millions in lifetime transfers to their children free of estate, gift or income tax through grantor-retained annuity trusts.

We have helped dozens of clients acquire or sell millions of dollars in full or fractional interests in private jets and custom-built yachts.

We have helped clients structure and maintain dozens of private foundations; foundations we helped establish gave more than $100 million in one year for the betterment of the communities where we and our clients live and work.

We assisted a client in arranging a gift of a $20 million Picasso to the Detroit Institute of Arts.

We helped a private foundation donate $7 million to rebuild historic Meadowbrook Hall on the campus of Oakland University.

We helped a client structure several significant charitable bequests, including the largest donation ever made to a private college in Michigan.

• Email this page