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Barry R. Robinson

Barry Robinson devotes a significant portion of his practice to estate planning and administration for closely held business owners, including gift and estate tax liquidity planning, planning to provide for continuity and control within the founder's family, the use of split interest trusts designed to “leverage” the unified credit, and planning for preservation of S corporation status.

Mr. Robinson has planned and implemented many basic annual exclusion and unified credit gift programs, as well as more sophisticated gift programs involving charitable organizations, including the creation of private foundations, support organizations to public charities, and the use of donor-advised funds of community foundations. In that respect, he has planned and implemented charitable lead trusts, including charitable lead unitrusts designed to “leverage” the generation-skipping tax exemption, as well as more traditional charitable remainder trusts.

Mr. Robinson has been responsible for the administration of many estates and trusts, any number of which include various closely held business interests, and a few of which approach $75 million to $100 million in size and involve the relatively more complex and sophisticated tax and property law issues that generally are associated with trusts and estates of that size.

In that regard, he is experienced in the areas of fiduciary income tax planning and compliance, as well as the use of the various post-mortem planning tools available, such as qualified disclaimers, partial QTIP elections and other estate tax elections. He also has extensive experience in handling estate and gift tax controversies at the IRS field audit level, as well as handling a number of cases through resolution at the IRS appellate level.

Mr. Robinson’s practice has expanded into the area of trust, estate and fiduciary litigation. For example, Mr. Robinson has been primarily responsible for the successful prosecution of a significant declaratory judgment action in probate court that ultimately resolved a number of family and closely held business succession issues; the successful defense of fiduciaries and beneficiaries in actions brought against them in federal and state courts, including representation in extensive multiple party settlement negotiations with respect thereto; and the representation of the primary plaintiffs in the prosecution of significant will and trust contest, legal and accounting malpractice, and tortious interference with expectancy actions.

Mr. Robinson is a member of the boards of directors of several local small businesses and a member of the board of legal advisors to The Columbus Foundation, a community foundation. He is a Fellow in the American College of Trusts and Estates Counsel. He is also a member of the American, Ohio and Columbus Bar Associations.

His efforts contributed to the enactment of Ohio Revised Code § 1340.22, et seq., which he analyzed in articles entitled, “Tax Sensitive Powers of Fiduciaries” and “Ohio Tax Sensitive Fiduciary Powers Statute: Relevant Developments,” recently published in the Probate Law Journal of Ohio by the Banks-Baldwin Law Publishing Company.