Private Clients

Morris James provides a comprehensive range of services to high net worth clients, often with complex holdings and diversified assets.

We assist our clients in all aspects of individual and family wealth management and preservation, designing successful strategies for minimizing income taxes, as well as gift, estate, and generation-skipping transfer taxes through multi-generational planning. Taking advantage of Delaware’s unique and favorable trust laws, we create trust structures tailored to specific client needs for reducing taxes, providing protection against creditor claims, and targeting individual beneficiary situations, including those with special needs or disabilities. Through the use of trusts and other planning techniques, we have successfully implemented countless intra-family sales and gifts of business interests, residences, real property, and other high-value assets to efficiently shift wealth within families and minimize taxes. We frequently advise financial institutions regarding transfer planning, fiduciary, and custodial matters, and represent executors, trustees and beneficiaries in probate proceedings and trust administration matters. We are often called on to represent executors or trustees in complex administrations involving multiple jurisdictions, hard-to-value assets, management issues of business interests, difficult distribution problems including family settlements, and tax audits.

We collaborate with our clients, their financial advisors, and our attorney-colleagues in related areas of the law to develop individualized responses and strategies that align with our clients’ business, financial, and personal objectives.  As our clients’ needs require, our team regularly includes members of several Morris James practice groups, including:

• Trusts and Estates
• Taxation
• Real Estate
• Business Transactions
• Succession Planning
• Strategic Business Planning and Counseling
• Family Law
• Litigation

These collaborative efforts provide client benefits in matters as diverse as the negotiation of prenuptial agreements, seamless business continuity, structuring arrangements for shared ownership and use of vacation and resort properties, creating vehicles for ownership of aircraft and yachts and, where necessary, supporting our clients in litigation and other controversies. In appropriate situations, we assist in comprehensive planning to protect assets against potential creditor claims, employing limited liability companies, Delaware asset protection trusts, and other strategies.

Morris James attorneys counsel our clients in appropriate and tax-efficient uses of life insurance, and can assist in developing retirement plan distribution strategies to minimize taxes on distributions, respond to individual beneficiary situations, and provide a standard of living commensurate with pre-retirement levels. In appropriate cases, we develop plans for charitable giving, including charitable remainder trusts, charitable lead trusts, gift annuities, and the creation of private foundations.

We work with our clients’ professional advisers to perform wealth management analyses and evaluate assets from the perspective of wealth preservation, gifting, and suitability in light of the client’s goals, tolerance for risk and relevant timing considerations.

Through our affiliations with law firms throughout the United States and internationally, we are able to provide services to clients who maintain homes or other assets outside the tri-state area.

We measure our success by that of our clients, as well as by the close relationships we develop over time with the families we serve. We are proud that we are frequently called on to advise and guide successive generations of the same family in preserving family wealth and protecting prospects for the future.

Our High Net Worth Strategy Team delivers customized and sophisticated legal services tailored specifically to address the needs and priorities of those who derive substantial income from their own business or profession.

Our attorneys assist clients in identifying concerns and challenges, work with them in setting specific goals, and map out the means to attain those goals. Our experience and knowledge across a broad array of industries, from the local to those with national and international markets, helps to provide insight into the big picture of our client's business, economic, and business cycle concerns, and strategies for maximizing profit and reducing risk.

As a team, we consider all factors that may affect a business owner’s vision of success, including the preservation and growth of business and personal assets, compensation planning, retirement and deferred compensation arrangements, business continuity through planning viable succession strategies, the roles of real estate and insurance, and financing and taxes. Bringing together disparate elements and influences helps our clients to make reasonable and informed business decisions and to implement the appropriate planning.

Our attorneys have extensive experience in structuring and forming business entities for maximum tax advantage and liability protection, and are able to provide ongoing advice through all stages of the business life cycle. We provide assistance in a wide range of business transactions, including asset and stock acquisitions and dispositions, mergers and other reorganization transactions, tax-deferred exchanges, and complex corporate split-offs. With extensive experience in the use and design of Delaware trusts and limited liability companies, we assist clients in developing business vehicles that afford tax advantages to residents and non-residents of the state, and minimize risks of ownership and operation.

Our attorneys assist business clients in developing compensation strategies, bonus programs, deferred compensation arrangements, and other incentive programs to maximize benefits for business owners and retain key employees. Experience across many industries and groups helps us to devise benefit programs that operate effectively within applicable tax and ERISA guidelines and requirements.

We have assisted three generations of business owners in developing succession plans that maximize the prospects for successful transitions from current owners to family members, key employees, or others. Whether the goal is business continuity or an exit strategy, succession planning is an integral part of both sound business and wealth preservation, but it is the advance planning that is key to putting the success into succession planning.  Our attorneys have played vital roles in designing, negotiating, and implementing cross purchases, corporate and partnership redemptions, and boot-strap transactions, always with a view to optimizing both tax advantages and prospects for success. We have developed compensation continuation arrangements for retiring business owners, non-competition agreements for the benefit of new owners, and financing structures with third-party financing, life insurance, and disability insurance components.