Estate, Gift and Generation-Skipping Transfer Taxes

Baker Botts is among the leading law firms in the world, with a nationally prominent Estate, Gift and Generation-Skipping Transfer Tax practice. We focus on extremely complicated situations or those involving vast amounts of wealth, or both. Our team is experienced in the areas of family business structuring and restructuring, family limited partnerships and advanced asset transfer techniques, as well as the defense of those techniques against IRS challenges. We have been involved in many of the most high-profile estate and gift tax cases in the last 20 years. 

Estate Tax: 
To many people, planning for estate taxes seems like a difficult and daunting task. And for good reason, since the constantly changing tax laws make planning in this area extremely complicated. With proper planning our clients can greatly minimize and even eliminate the application of the estate tax to their estates.

Our lawyers guide clients through this maze and are well versed in all facets of the estate tax, from planning to avoid it, to following the rules involved in the administration of estates by executors, to the preparation of complicated estate tax returns, to defending against the most current positions taken by the IRS in litigation against the more advanced estate planning techniques.

Gift Tax:
Baker Botts understands the complexities in structuring estate plans to avoid this additional tax that is aimed at preventing taxpayers from making large gifts in order to avoid the estate tax at death. Our lawyers are well-versed in the sophisticated techniques required to make large gifts to family members or charity.

Our lawyers are familiar with all aspects of the gift tax and are particularly adept at creating and defending asset transfers for clients without triggering gift tax. Our lawyers handle transfer tax disputes with the IRS at all levels (IRS audit, administrative appeals and litigation) involving the most complicated and sophisticated asset transfer strategies.

Generation-Skipping Transfer Tax: 
Our Private Clients lawyers are skilled at planning around, and complying with, the exceptionally complicated generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax system. The GST tax functions as a protective wrapper around the gift and estate tax systems.

At Baker Botts, we help our clients take maximum advantage of the substantial wealth preservation benefits associated with generation-skipping planning, particularly through the use of long-term trusts that skip estate tax at each generation without skipping the people as beneficiaries in that generation.

Leveraging a client’s exemption from the GST tax is the cornerstone of many estate plans structured by our lawyers. We also have extensive experience in proper reporting to the IRS for GST purposes on gift and estate tax returns.