Estate Planning
No matter your estate planning goals or needs, our experienced team of attorneys can help you.
Utilizing Common Sense In Approaching Your Estate Planning Needs
Common sense tells you that you do not plan your estate or solve trust and estate problems just by throwing money at them. That same common sense should tell you that you do not plan your estate or solve your trust and estate problems by throwing money at your attorneys. The best solutions and the best attorneys are not necessarily the most expensive.
At Barulich Dugoni Suttmann & Cummins Law Group, Inc., we are experienced attorneys with a proven track record in successfully handling complex, high-stakes wealth transfers, administrations and related controversies.
Areas of Expertise
Estate planning encompasses an assortment of legal aspects. Our firm offers extensive knowledge of these often-interrelated areas of estate planning law and how they could affect your unique situation.
1. Will and Trust Planning
Comprehensive will planning ensures the appropriate handling of your affairs and distribution of assets upon your death. Our trust planning services create a legal arrangement for transferring your assets to another individual or entity.
2. Probate Administration
Probate is the process of the court legally dividing a deceased person’s assets and handling their debt repayment. Our estate planning and probate administration services help manage this estate settlement process as expeditiously as possible.
3. Trust Administration
Our estate administration services also encompass legal trust arrangements. We will implement a collaborative strategy to ensure the appropriate and satisfactory management and distribution of assets held within a trust.
4. Trust and Estate Litigation
Trusts and estate administration can sometimes lead to disputes between heirs and other impacted individuals and entities. While we make every effort to resolve these issues outside of a courtroom, we are willing and able to pursue further legal action if necessary.
5. Business Succession Planning
Do you own a business and want it to keep running smoothly if you retire, pass away or move on to other opportunities? Our business succession planning services can ensure a seamless transition to a new owner and give you peace of mind.
6. Wealth Transfer
Your Barulich Dugoni Suttmann & Cummins Law Group, Inc. estate planning attorney can help craft an effective strategy to protect your assets for generations. Focus areas include ensuring that your family has a plan outlining how to proceed if you are no longer around and methods for preventing unnecessary estate taxation.
7. Tax Planning
The increasing complexity of tax laws requires expert guidance to avoid potentially costly errors. Our tax planning services include collaborating with your accountant or financial adviser to craft a strategy that reduces your burden. We can also represent you in legal matters involving taxation.
8. Real Estate Planning
Our attorneys can assist with various commercial and residential real estate issues and transactions. We can address crucial areas like property tax planning considerations, the impact of property ownership on estate planning and integrating your property into a trust plan.
9. Asset Protection
You have worked hard to accumulate wealth. We can help you develop a strategy that minimizes the risk of losing your assets in a lawsuit or to creditors. A well-crafted plan can also reduce the economic incentive for others to pursue legal action against you or your business.
Problem Solving Using Cost-Effective Solutions
Experience has taught us that the best solutions are the most cost-effective. As a client, you cannot afford to focus on just half of the cost equation and ignore the other: the cost of an ineffective estate plan, or worse yet, litigation. And you cannot afford attorneys who do the same.
Cost-effective problem solving begins on Day One. It involves helping the client face the sometimes challenging realities of family dynamics, probate and taxes by defining the client’s critical interests and crafting a strategy to protect those interests. Doing this focuses the process and helps eliminate unnecessary activity that all too often just seems to create more work for the attorney, and thus higher costs for the client.
Prioritizing Planning for the Future
Our experience has shown that it is better to face those issues on Day One, when you have the opportunity to shape the process with realities firmly in mind, rather than post-death, or when a disgruntled beneficiary files a trust contest, after employing an army of attorneys and paralegals to get you there. If your attorney is not helping you do that, then you have the wrong attorney.
Considering Alternative Solutions
Common sense: a powerful tool when applied to finding legal solutions. Think about your alternatives the next time you have an estate or trust problem, and, think of us as your alternative solution. Bigger and more expensive is not necessarily better. We have built our practice on the belief that clients remember, and keep coming back to, those attorneys who listen and remember the clients’ “bottom line.”
Consult With an Experienced Estate Planning Attorney
Estate planning is a complex topic with rarely just one right way to go about it. Our attorneys at Barulich Dugoni Suttmann & Cummins Law Group, Inc., are prepared to work with you to find the appropriate solution for your estate planning needs. Contact our Burlingame office at 650-292-2900, or submit an inquiry online.