The Conner-Zaritsky 44th Annual Advanced Estate Planning and Administration Seminar 2023

This session will cover significant tax developments.

Virginia Developments in Estate Planning and Administration
Katherine E. Ramsey

This session will review significant state law developments.

This discussion will address the practical issues in drafting and then carrying out your client’s wishes regarding health care and end-of-life decisions.

This presentation will discuss how a clear and concise engagement letter can help to prevent ethical issues in client matters. It will cover the reasons for using engagement letters, what they should contain and why. Specifically, we will examine some of the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct to see how engagement letters help attorneys comply with the ethical rules regarding: competence (Rule 1.1), scope of engagement (Rule 1.2), communication (Rule 1.4), confidentiality (Rule 1.6), avoidance of conflicts of interest both generally (Rule 1.7) and with respect to former clients (Rule 1.9), charging reasonable fees (Rule 1.5), and declining or terminating representation (Rule 1.16). Communication with clients through a written engagement letter sets expectations for the engagement by identifying the client, defining the scope of the project or matter, and providing an explanation of how the fee will be determined. This presentation will also discuss the concept of a “non-engagement” letter, as well as termination letters, engagement letters for representing fiduciaries, attorneys acting as fiduciaries, and best practices for each. In the second portion of the presentation, we will explore the duties owed to clients with respect to the materials in their file, how long lawyers need to keep various documents, and file destruction. In this section, we will also review legal ethics options and the following rules to determine how these materials provide guidance on these issues: Rule 1.4 (confidentiality), Rule 1.15 (safekeeping property), and Rule 1.16 (declining or terminating representation).

The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) represents the most significant reformation of the Bank Secrecy Act and related anti-money laundering rules since the US PATRIOT Act. Although the CTA is mainly focused on requiring corporations, limited liability companies, and partnerships, trusts may also find themselves having to comply with disclosures related to beneficial ownership. With the final regulations under the CTA going into effect on January 1, 2024, now is the time for wealth planning and tax practitioners to better understand these compliance obligations.

When it comes to trust planning and administration, the need to understand the income tax treatment of trusts has become more important than ever. This session will discuss the fundamentals of distributable net income (DNI) and explain how DNI differs from taxable income and fiduciary accounting income. To help practitioners minimize the burden of higher trust tax rates and avoid many of the traps for the unwary, this session also will address the allocation of DNI among beneficiaries, the separate-share rule, the 65-day rule, specific bequests, in-kind distributions, and the inclusion of capital gains in DNI.

This presentation will explore the flexibility, opportunities, and pitfalls for estate and tax planning for the married client, such as portability; opportunities for estate tax, gift tax, and GST tax planning involving a spouse; SLATs/SLANTs/SPLATs (and the rest of this family of acronyms); reciprocal trusts; the “step” transaction doctrine; planning and the potential for divorce, such as the effect of divorce on grantor trusts; and citizenship and its effect on marital planning.

Tax basis and realization are fluid concepts in the world of partnership taxation, especially when one considers the “unitary basis” rule and how grantors, grantor trusts, and disregarded entities are treated as the same taxpayer. In such a world with potential changes to the treatment of grantor trusts on the horizon, entities taxed as partnership provide the most sophisticated platform to exchange assets and strip, shift, create, combine, and concentrate basis. This presentation will explore these concepts through the lens of common estate planning situations and the basis conundrum created if section 2036 applies to the partnership.

An examination (with hypotheticals and multiple-choice question & answer) of practical situations where ethical issues arise in the estate planning and administration context through joint representation and/or your client(s) needs representation multiple capacities.

The SECURE Act simplifies some aspects of planning for retirement accounts, and it complicates others. The proposed regulations relating to the SECURE Act included helpful guidance and a few surprises. This presentation will address what has changed, what has stayed the same, and how you, as a planner, can apply the new rules to the common situations that your clients face. If final regulations are issued before the seminar, then the speakers will do their best to update their presentation to include the guidance that the final regulations provide.

This session will cover significant developments or topics of interest that may have arisen after the program and speakers are set for the coming year.

In this session, several of our speakers will respond to your questions.