The gold standard for estate planning has been the AB Trust. With the new estate tax provisions of the Tax Relief Act of 2010 now in effect, questions have arisen as to whether AB Trust planning is still necessary. The truth is, the AB Trust continues to be a great option because the it has […]

Setting fees for your services… it’s something we could have an endless conversation about. How do you determine what to charge when price is such an elastic thing? And, are you bound by what your competitors are charging?The first thing you have to do when determining what fees to charge is to stop comparing yourself […]

It happens to all of us: all the professional and personal projects and responsibilities build up, and we get overwhelmed. And if you’re not careful, feeling overwhelmed can lead to a kind of paralysis, causing you to waste time and make the situation even worse. Sometimes, when I’m feeling overwhelmed, I follow a two-step system […]

Today’s technology now allows us to determine paternity via DNA testing – even when the father in question is no longer living. The question now becomes, under what circumstances will states allow posthumous paternity testing – especially in order to establish legitimacy so that a child can inherit from his or her alleged father? It’s […]

Adding an image to a law firm news posting or page is fairly easy once you know how. You will simply go into Contineo and insert a special code and an image location link. Getting Started: First, you will need to have a place online where you can store the image you will be linking […]

Do you know where your firm’s money is at any given moment? This is a necessity because, as we all know, you can produce a profit and still be short of cash. If you’ve owned a firm for any length of time, you know that money is not a constant. It ebbs and flows, sometimes […]

It has often been said that the path to knowledge begins with knowing what you don’t know. As usual, this year’s Heckerling Institute helps put the estate planning attorney on the path to knowledge by highlighting how much we do not know. Section 2001(b)(1) calculates the estate tax in the year of death as the […]

Martin Luther King made this statement about Hope: “We must accept finite disappointment, but we never lose infinite hope.” There is something about the New Year that echoes the thought of hope and new possibilities. As each year draws to a close we look forward to a fresh start. The things that seemed out of […]

Profit: most of us use it as a marker for whether our practice is thriving or just barely limping along. But, just glancing at overall profit without taking a deeper look can spell disaster for your law firm. Profit can be a false sign of health, masking deeper problems. Did you know there are two […]

Historically, states have had legal frameworks for dealing inheritance rights in the not uncommon situation where a baby is conceived during its father’s lifetime but born after his death. At common law, a baby born within 280 days after its father’s death was presumed to be the father’s child, and therefore entitled to inherit from […]