Practice Areas

Estate Planning and Probate

This Section provides a full range of estate planning and probate services. Our goal is to help our clients and their families benefit from legal strategies that preserve family wealth for future generations.

Our Estate Planning and Probate attorneys are Coastal Bend natives and our clients have included prominent citizens of South Texas and the trust departments of major banks.

In addition to the preparation of wills and trusts, we consult on income, estate, gift, inheritance and generation-skipping taxes.

We also provide legal advice regarding estate planning through intervivos gifts, insurance planning, various “estate freezing” techniques and charitable gift planning.

We also use business planning techniques to transfer the wealth of an older generation to a younger generation. These techniques involve creation of corporations and partnerships with special features and complex income, estate and gift tax considerations.

Our attorneys assist in estate administration by representing executors in probating decedents’ wills, preparing estate tax returns and representing estates before the Internal Revenue Service in contested matters. Estate administration may also involve representation in disputes arising among beneficiaries, including will contests and fiduciary litigation.

We also provide income tax planning for trusts and their beneficiaries. Our attorneys counsel corporate trusts concerning fiduciary responsibility, including representation in complex trust modifications, reformations and related litigation.

We understand the use of asset protection planning tools, which range from the making of outright gifts to reduce one’s assets subject to exposure, to creating family limited partnerships, to the use of domestic and offshore trusts.

The Estate Planning group also provides counsel in various related areas, including marital property agreements, powers of attorney, designations of guardians and techniques for providing healthcare and property management for incapacitated or elderly clients.


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