Karen serves as Barclay Damon’s Trusts & Estates Practice Area co-chair, primarily concentrating her practice on providing clients with comprehensive counsel on all aspects of estate planning, administration, and business-succession matters. She advises on trust and estate wealth-management and administration strategies, including estate, gift, and income-tax planning opportunities as well as options for asset protection. Karen recommends, designs, and implements practical plans that consider legal and tax complexities relevant to client objectives and concerns in order to best meet their unique needs as well as those of their families and businesses.
Karen has extensive experience preparing estate-planning documents, including wills, revocable living trusts, irrevocable trusts, durable powers of attorney, health care proxies, and beneficiary designations. She also provides guidance on pre- and post-nuptial agreements that are necessary to safeguard estate plans and structures family limited partnerships, limited liability companies, and corporations to provide liability protection and a tax-efficient transition of ownership. Karen routinely uses Excel spreadsheets and flow charts to provide clients with simple, visual explanations of how each distinct estate plan works.
Karen also counsels business owners on legal and tax issues, including succession planning; tax planning; financial transactions; mergers and acquisitions; general business matters; the formation and structuring of business entities, including C and S corporations, limited liability companies, partnerships, professional corporations, and other entities for licensed professionals; and develops owner agreements such as operating, shareholder, and buy-sell agreements to achieve business- and estate-planning goals and to prevent future disputes and litigation. While Karen’s goal is to prepare clear, well-documented plans, in the event of a dispute, she fiercely advocates for her clients, whether through negotiation or the court system.