Joe Verciglio counsels high-net-worth individuals and families in the areas of estate and trust planning. Joe’s practice encompasses all phases of such planning, including lifetime gifting, testamentary dispositions and estate administration.
Joe works with clients to implement wealth transfer strategies that contain the right balance of personal planning and tax savings objectives. Personal planning objectives may include creditor protection, pre- and post-nuptial agreements and the use of various trust and entity structures (LLCs and partnerships) to create a framework to control distributions to beneficiaries both now and in the future. The tax objective is typically to reduce estate, gift and generation-skipping transfer tax. Tax savings are accomplished through the particular structure of the estate plan—a properly structured plan also takes into account personal and/or trust (or other entity) income taxation to achieve optimal results.
Joe has extensive experience counseling individuals and families that own significant interests in closely held businesses. With an understanding of the unique issues that affect a closely held business owner, Joe is able to provide solutions to the owner and his or her family. Control is a major concern for the closely held business owner and can prevent the owner from engaging in effective estate planning, thereby subjecting his or her estate to maximum taxation. Joe works with business owners to create strategies that enable the owners to confidently transfer interests in their companies to their families. Such strategies may include recapitalizing the company and gifting non-voting shares, gifting and/or selling interests to various trust structures in which the Trustee of the trust rather than the family member owns the interests, and implementing shareholders’ agreements that impose restrictions on the transferability of the interests.
Charitable planning also is an important facet of Joe’s practice. Joe is able to offer solutions to clients that allow them to accomplish their philanthropic goals (solutions may include the establishment of charitable trusts, foundations or donor advised funds, or simple lifetime or testamentary outright gifting, to name a few).
For the past three years, Joe has been a speaker at the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association’s “Back to Basics” continuing legal education seminar where he discusses the drafting of wills, revocable and irrevocable trust agreements, financial powers of attorney and healthcare documents. Joe is a member of the American Bar Association (Real Property, Trust and Estate Law Section), the Ohio State Bar Association and the Estate Planning Council of Cleveland, where he serves on the Activities Committee. Joe lives in Rocky River, Ohio, with his wife and son.
10/6/2010 - Baker Hostetler Bolsters Succession Planning, Wealth Management Practice: Four Attorneys Join Cleveland Office