Practical Issues in Wealth Planning and Drafting

3 units

Where theory crosses with practicality. This course involves the implementation of basic and advanced estate and wealth planning concepts. Such concepts will include marital deduction formulas, power of appointments, generation-skipping transfer tax, potential issues of fiduciary litigation, estate planning for retirement assets, the grantor trust rules and trust administration. Additionally, this course will assist students in understanding interviewing clients and formulating estate plans. Throughout this class, students will be given opportunities to implement and formulate estate plans for hypothetical scenarios. Students will have a good understanding of various estate and wealth planning documents, including simple wills, wills with testamentary trusts, various types of trusts, health care and financial powers of attorney, and various other ancillary documents. This course will also discuss issues relating to funding trusts. There will be a final exam involving analyzing a taxable estate, summarizing the estate planning issues that exist in a format easily understood by a typical client and then drafting a set of basic estate planning documents. Estate & Gift Taxation or Trust & Estates shall be a prerequisite for this course. This course will be a good pre-requisite for the spring class Estate Planning and Drafting: Advanced Topics. [JD students taking this course will receive a letter grade which will not calculate into their JD GPA. JD students must request approval to take this course only if: 1) student has not previously taken, or is requesting not to be required to take Federal Income Tax concurrently, or, 2) student has already taken three total Graduate Tax Courses. The approval form is at http://law.wustl.edu/Registrar/forms/PermissionforJDtotakeLLMTaxcourse.pdf.]