Chad W. Makuch

Experience

Individuals and High-Net-Worth Families 

• Represents high-net-worth individuals and families in estate planning matters and advises them with their testamentary planning (wills and revocable trusts), lifetime planning and gifting, business succession planning, and charitable giving. 
• Meets clients’ objectives by employing vehicles such as installment sales, dynasty trusts, insurance trusts, grantor trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts, spousal lifetime access trusts, incomplete non-grantor trusts, decanting, private settlement agreements, family limited partnerships and limited liability companies.
• Transfers assets while minimizing or eliminating costly gift, estate and generation-skipping transfer taxes. In several such matters, designed estate plans that preserved millions of dollars for the benefit of his clients' families and charities (which otherwise would have been paid in transfer taxes).
• Designs estate plans to protect his clients' assets from future creditors' claims and to maintain his clients' privacy where the law might otherwise make his clients' concerns a matter of public record.

Family Offices and Private Trust Companies

• Collaborates with family office personnel to assist in the design, creation and implementation of estate plans and philanthropies for their clients.
• Assists clients in the formation of private trust companies and their ongoing legal matters. These engagements involve ownership and control structures unique to each PTC.
• Primary estate planning counsel for one of the wealthiest families in the United States with an estimated net worth of $10 billion. Collaborates with the family’s sophisticated financial, tax, accounting and business advisors in six states.
• Primary estate planning counsel for a multi-generational family that owns and operates a series of companies with an approximate net worth in excess of $3 billion. Works with the family members and their advisors on business succession and estate planning matters.

Trusts and Estates

• Represents trustees and executors, whether individuals or institutions, in the administration of large trusts and estates.
• Guides clients through the formal and often complex process of preparing estate tax returns, inventories, accountings, fiduciary tax reports and more.
• Regularly fields questions regarding fiduciary duties and responsibilities under multimillion and multibillion dollar trusts and the proper investment of those assets.
• Provides litigation and pre-litigation support to BakerHostetler’s probate and fiduciary litigation practice. By gaining and formalizing consensus under private settlement agreements or declaratory judgment actions, helps clients avoid litigation or, where litigation becomes unavoidable, provides support to litigators.

Private Foundations

• Provides guidance in such areas as governance, fiduciary best practices, obtaining and maintaining tax exempt status, grant making and grant administration, unrelated business income taxes, and compliance with intermediate sanction rules to avoid excise taxes for self-dealing, jeopardy investments, excess business holdings, or taxable expenditures.

Memberships

• American College of Trust and Estate Counsel 
  • Fellow (2022)
• Ohio State Bar Association 
  • Estate Planning, Trust and Probate Law Section Council
• Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association
  • Estate Planning, Trust and Probate Law Section
    • Chair (2022 to 2023)
    • Vice Chair (2021 to 2022)
    • Head of Programming (2020 to 2021)
    • Co-Speaker Chair (2019 to 2020)
    • Treasurer (2019 to 2020)
• American Bar Association 
• Estate Planning Council of Cleveland
• Tax Club of Cleveland 

Community

• University Hospitals
  • Diamond Advisory Group
  • Ride the Rainbow Gala: Planning Committee (2014)
• A Kid Again: Volunteer member of a charity striving to foster hope, happiness and healing for families raising kids with life-threatening illnesses
• Princeton Association of Northern Ohio
• St. Basil the Great Catholic Church of Brecksville, Ohio