Brown McCarroll Attorneys at Law

Whether you own a successful business, enjoy a productive career as an executive or a professional, earn your living from the land through ranching, farming, or oil and gas interests, or are simply a frugal saver, the estate you have built represents a lifetime investment of your energy and resources.

Shouldn’t you think carefully about what will ultimately happen to your estate?

A Plan to Fit Your Needs

At Brown McCarroll, our business is helping our clients succeed. The lawyers in our Estate Planning and Probate Group are skilled in generational wealth transfer, charitable gift planning, business succession planning, and asset protection. Whether your estate is large or small, you can be assured of a plan tailored to your individual needs and life goals.

Business Planning

If your business has not taken measures to ensure a smooth transition of management when you are no longer its leader, you can benefit from Brown McCarroll’s extensive experience. Privately-held businesses pose unique estate planning challenges, and we can help structure your business to facilitate transfer of ownership and management, or a sale.

Business succession planning or planning for the successful sale of a privately-owned business is often the most important and most difficult planning in the life of a business. And, the most successful business succession planning starts years before the actual transition.

In the case of one family we represent, we advised the first generation owners of a family business in the transfer of the management of the business to the second generation family members who had proven themselves able to manage the business while transferring ownership of the business (worth over $175 million) equally to all second generation family members at an estate tax cost of less than $25 million – an effective overall estate tax rate of 14.3% during a period that the estate tax rates applicable to that generation’s estates ranged from 45% to 55%.

The breadth of experience that Brown McCarroll attorneys possess also provides us access to the valuable insight of other lawyers outside the traditional “estate planning” practice group.  For more information, please visit our privately-held companies page.

Tax Planning

We advise individuals and families on strategies designed to minimize the burden of estate, gift, and other transfer taxes.  These strategies include effective ways to:

• Estimate and minimize estate tax liability exposure.
• Create a variety of trusts and lifetime gifts to shelter family assets and minimize tax impact, such as revocable living trusts, charitable trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts, qualified personal residence trusts, insurance trusts and generation-skipping trusts.
• Diversify investments in ways that structure the estate to qualify for payment of estate taxes during an extended period of years.
• Minimize the impact of the federal estate tax on a family business while transferring control to the next generation.

Resolving Controversies

Estate and trust disputes are often highly sensitive and complex. We represent clients in litigation and negotiation and strive to leverage our knowledge of effective tax and business planning to craft win-win solutions to resolve family disputes.

Counseling Public and Private Foundations

We represent many public charities, private foundations and charitable trusts, monitoring each to help the organization meet all the Tax Code requirements for tax-exempt status. Our attorneys make exempt status applications to the Internal Revenue Service, secure letters of determination, and respond to audits and inquiries involving Section 501(c)(3) charitable and 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations. We also form charitable lead trusts and charitable remainder trusts to implement tax-deductible gifts to various charitable organizations, finalizing all details of qualifying tax-exempt status for contributions. Our goal is to enable our foundation clients to pursue all the activities and advantages Congress provides in the Tax Code.

Our experience helping non-profit organizations extends beyond our estate planning-related work. For more information, please visit our nonprofit organizations page.

Water and Land Conservation

Families that we represent who are interested in water and land conservation typically view their land very differently than their other assets. And, often their most important estate planning goal is to pass their land on intact to future generations. Even though this goal raises many challenging issues that are unique and personal to each family, one common challenge that all such families have is the federal estate tax. Our estate planning attorneys have developed multiple techniques to enable families to accomplish their estate planning goals and minimize their federal estate tax liability. Please visit our water and land conservation page for more information about the additional services we offer in this area.

Our Attorneys

Among our practice group attorneys are Fellows of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC), a Chair of the Legislative Committee (Probate) of the Real Estate, Probate, and Trust Law Section (REPTL) of the State Bar of Texas, former Chairs of REPTL's Trust Code Committee and the Estate Planning and Probate Section of the Austin Bar Association, and a former President of the Estate Planning Council of Central Texas.

Our Commitment to Every Client

We measure our success by how effective your estate plan is in protecting your hard-earned wealth or the business you’ve nurtured from excessive estate taxes, lawsuits (including divorces), and other claims that may be made by the Internal Revenue Service or other litigants. Our commitment to you continues beyond the estate plan – we are there for your family to ensure that your estate plan is implemented during the administration of your estate and to provide advice to your survivors.

Call on the estate planning lawyers at Brown McCarroll to help you create a legacy that reflects the energy, passion, and values of your well-lived life.