It may be possible to double your gifting by using spousal “gift-splitting.” Spouses may elect to split gifts made to others. If they do so, they must split all the gifts made by the other spouse to others for that year. For example, let’s say John made gifts of $30,000 to each of his five […]

The 3-Pack, or the local pack as it’s sometimes called, is a prime piece of real estate on a page of search results. It’s the group of results you see at the very top of the page, right after paid ads. That means law firm websites that earn a spot in the 3-Pack garner the […]

Welcome to 2022! Most of us will leave 2021 without hesitation – many had high hopes that 2021 would bring the end of COVID-19 and a return to normalcy and yet we face another variant as we usher in 2022. While things may not have gone the way we hoped in 2021, we can start […]

Estate planning is a document-intensive business, and you might use Microsoft® Word® to produce those documents. Have you ever been frustrated while formatting them? You can no doubt use all the tips you can get. Plus, there are probably a lot more things you can do with Word than you realized. The book, Style is […]

As 2021 draws to a close and the New Year dawns, we need to think of…tax planning! Some years Congress tweaks the laws more than other years. While 2021 held plenty of events: a coronavirus vaccine, new coronavirus variants, a new President, etc., it was a relatively quiet year for legislative changes impacting planning. At […]

You’ve heard the old adage, “you reap what you sow.” The same is true in your law firm. Many times, we’ll hear about a law firm with too many open spots on the calendar. “Revenue is down… I don’t understand it, things were so great for a while.” If you want to explain the revenue, or […]

September usually brings the start of a new school year, cooler temperatures, football, and a time for reflection in the final quarter. This year, September brought concern, bordering on panic, over proposed changes to the Internal Revenue Code (“Code”) when Congress released legislation containing several proposals eliminating the benefits of many tried and true Estate […]

Do you ever wrap up your workday feeling dissatisfied with your productivity and progress? Are you frustrated because your day is often hijacked by fires and other people’s priorities instead of focused on your own to-do list and goals? When you finally carve out focus time, is that time unproductive due to a slew of […]

Estate Planning attorneys have long recommended the use of closely-held entities such as family limited partnerships (“FLPs”) and limited liability companies (“LLCs”) to provide flexibility in allocating rights to profits and capital, to shift income and property appreciation from one generation to the next, and to provide asset protection. Individuals transfer assets to the entity in […]

To thank our subscribers for being such valuable members of the American Academy community, we’ve decided to release THREE training resources as a FREE year-end gift for non-Member attorneys. Don’t miss the opportunity to listen to the education session “Ethics of Representing Clients with Diminished Capacity” presented by Nancy Maurer, Professor of Law, Director of […]