Chad Makuch is an estate planning and tax lawyer who focuses on counseling wealthy families, institutional trustees, other fiduciaries and tax-exempt organizations. He helps families transfer assets and business interests to children, grandchildren and charities while minimizing or eliminating transfer taxes; counsels fiduciaries in connection with their responsibilities under complex trusts and applicable laws; and guides public charities and private foundations through the tax laws and regulations that govern them.
Chad also works with Baker Hostetler’s benefits, general tax and tax controversy lawyers. He works with benefits lawyers to design, implement and administer employee benefit plans and he works with other tax lawyers on a wide-range of income tax and employment tax issues, including retirement income, the characterization of income as ordinary or capital gains, withholding requirements, audit responses and tax controversy issues in general.
Chad represents high-net-worth individuals and families in a wide variety of estate planning matters. He advises them with their testamentary planning (wills and revocable trusts), lifetime planning and gifting, business succession planning and charitable giving. He employs a variety of vehicles to help his clients meet their objectives, including installment sales, dynasty trusts, insurance trusts, grantor trusts, GRATs, family limited partnerships and limited liability companies.
Chad’s knowledge and experience allows his individual and family clients to transfer assets while minimizing or eliminating costly gift, estate and generation-skipping transfer taxes.
Chad represents trustees and executors in the administration of large trusts and estates. He guides them through the formal and often complex process of preparing estate tax returns, inventories, accountings, fiduciary tax reports and more. He regularly fields questions regarding fiduciary duties and responsibilities under multimillion- and multibillion-dollar trusts and the proper investment of those assets.
In addition, Chad provides litigation and pre-litigation support to Baker Hostetler’s probate and fiduciary litigation practice. He helps clients avoid litigation by gaining and formalizing consensus under private settlement agreements or declaratory judgment actions and, where litigation cannot be avoided, provides support to litigators.
Chad represents public charities, family private foundations, hospitals, health plans and healthcare organizations with respect to their tax exemptions. Chad is experienced with a variety of tax-exempt organization matters, including applications for tax-exempt status recognition, unrelated business income taxes, restricted gift issues, charitable giving requirements, fundraising and more general counseling of exempt organizations in their day-to-day operations.
Chad assists the firm’s benefits counsel in a variety of matters, including the design, implementation and administration of health and welfare, cafeteria, retirement and executive compensation plans. He also monitors and advises clients on legislative and regulatory developments impacting such employee benefit plans.
Chad is a member of the Estate Planning Counsel of Cleveland, the Tax Club of Cleveland and the American, Ohio State and Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Associations. In 2011, he served on the Executive Committee of Cleveland’s 54th Annual Tax Institute.
Chad is a graduate of Princeton University and The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. In law school, he was a Moritz scholarship recipient and served as the Articles Editor of the Ohio State Law Journal. He also externed for Judge Guy L. Reece II at the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas.
Chad is dedicated to the city of Cleveland. He previously worked as a Special Assistant to the Director of the City of Cleveland’s Law Department and as a member of non-profit organizations working to draw young professionals to the Greater Cleveland area.
11/21/2011 - Health Law Update by Jennifer Mills, Susan Whittaker Hughes and Chad Makuch Featured in Law 360
10/27/2011 - Health Law Update—October 27, 2011
8/19/2011 - New Deadline to Issue Medicare Part D Annual Notices is Fast Approaching