Tax & Estates
Marcus & Shapira LLP’s tax practice focuses on tax-advantageous structuring of business transactions, negotiating, documenting and reporting such transactions, and tax litigation as needed to realize the intended tax consequences of such planning activities.
Richard Halpern has extensive experience with mergers, acquisitions, dispositions and other corporate and partnership restructurings, financings, partnership and LLC transactions and real estate, including special-allocation partnership agreements, nontaxable like-kind exchanges and proxy-statement and prospectus tax disclosures.
Robert M. Barnes, a litigation specialist, has long experience litigating civil and criminal tax matters, which is only one of the areas in which he applies expertise in handling witnesses and clients and making in-court oral and written presentations. Recently, Mr. Barnes collaborated with Mr. Halpern to attain the successful Appellate Court decision in Giant Eagle Inc. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 822 F.3d 666 (3rd Cir. 2016).
Also, significant portions of the tax planning practices of Richard Halpern and Darlene Nowak involve the taxation of wealth transfers and estate planning.
In the area of estate planning and administration, we draft wills and innumerable forms of lifetime transfers, custom tailored to the needs of the individual, including family limited partnerships, generation-skipping trusts and grantor-retained-interest and charitable-interest trusts.
The attorneys at Marcus & Shapira are actively engaged in continually updating themselves on the current rules and practices of the Internal Revenue Service regarding gifts, estates and pensions so as to offer our clients the most up-to-date, fully informed services.
Just as important as the technical aspects of wealth transfer and planning, however, are the particular needs of the individual. Our attorneys are experienced in the areas of elder-care planning, including Medicare and Medicaid eligibility, in-home care, competency issues and the needs and responsibilities of care-givers.
Marcus & Shapira also offers full services of estate and trust administration for both large and small estates, from the initial opening of the estate to federal estate and state-inheritance-tax compliance to the final audit.
Marcus & Shapira’s vast litigation experience dove-tails with our expertise in trusts and estates to offer the fullest, best-informed representation when the trust or estate involves private or tax claims and litigation.
The firm has successfully represented clients challenging and breaking the terms of a trust that had ceased to serve its intended purpose, and defended the rights and interests of the elderly in transferring their property.
