Estate Planning Skills CLE

The American Bar Association, Section of Real Property, Trust and Estate Law is sponsoring a program entitled Skills Training for Estate Planners at the New York Law School in New York City on July 13-17, 2009.

Here is a description of this seminar:

• Basic Fundamentals and Substantive Skills Development
  • Marital deduction basics, including analysis of how much to use the use of disclaimers or partial QTIP elections, funding and fiduciary administration problems
  • Charitable deduction planning including use of computer software
  • Analyzing inter vivos gifting, both basic and sophisticated transactions such as GRATs and QPRTs, including an analysis of when such techniques make sense
  • Life insurance planning, particularly with respect to irrevocable insurance trusts and the practical aspects of product selection, premium financing, and due diligence along with GST considerations
  • Deferred compensation and employee benefits, including beneficiary designation alternatives and drafting such designations
  • Practical tips on planning with the generation-skipping transfer tax
  • Preparing flexible trusts with an eye to the future
       
• Technical Skills Development
  • Client interviewing – with the “substantive” side (what information to obtain) coming as an ancillary element to learning the skills involved
  • Tax compliance: hands-on manual preparation to learn how the tax law works and how software can produce errors
  • Fiduciary administration and accounting and the tax aspects of postmortem and other fiduciary administration
  • Valuation in practice, including how to select valuation experts and analyze their work
  • Exposure to software programs and web sites that assist in the analysis of estate assets and facilitate construction of planning models
       
• Developing Ethical Attitudes
  • Ethics instruction in practical settings, particularly including representations of spouses and fiduciaries.