Wills and Estates Insights

Analysis and practical guides on wills and estates.

19 articles, checklists, and guides on wills and estates law, written by the attorneys at MC Law. Every piece is general information, not legal advice — for a specific matter, contact the firm.

Wills and EstatesElder Law

Special Needs Trusts and Medicaid Planning: Preserving Benefits Across Generations

Means-tested public benefits impose resource and income limits so low that any ordinary inheritance, settlement, or gift destroys eligibility, and the destruction is usually accidental. Special needs trusts exist to hold assets for a beneficiary without those assets counting as available resources, and the rules differ sharply depending on whose money funds the trust. A trust funded with the beneficiary's own money carries a mandatory Medicaid payback and strict statutory conditions; a trust funded by a parent or grandparent carries neither and is far more flexible. This article covers the benefits programs and their eligibility rules, the trust types and when each is used, drafting and administration including the distributions that quietly reduce a benefit check, and the Medicaid planning techniques available to an older adult facing long-term care costs.

Casey Scott McKayMay 30, 202426 min read

Wills and EstatesTrust Administration

Administering a Trust After the Grantor's Death: A Practical Guide

When the grantor of a revocable trust dies, the trust becomes irrevocable and the successor trustee assumes fiduciary duties to a group of beneficiaries who did not choose them. The work that follows runs on deadlines that are easy to miss and difficult to cure: a notice that starts a short contest period, a portability election that requires filing an estate tax return no estate tax is owed on, a disclaimer window that closes in nine months, and elections on the fiduciary income tax return that materially change what beneficiaries receive. The administration divides into distinct phases — securing assets and giving notice, marshaling and valuing, paying claims and taxes, dividing the trust into subtrusts, and distributing — each with its own documentation requirements. This guide walks the sequence and the decisions at each stage.

Casey Scott McKayMay 2, 202426 min read

Wills and EstatesEstate Planning

Who Will Inherit Your Intellectual Property?

Intellectual property is one of the most valuable and most forgotten categories of assets in an estate. Copyrights survive an author by seventy years and can throw off royalties for decades; patents, trademarks, trade secrets, royalty streams, and the right of publicity each pass to heirs under their own peculiar rules. This article explains how each type of IP is inherited, why the non-waivable copyright termination rights under 17 U.S.C. 203 and 304 can override your will, how the post-mortem right of publicity varies wildly from state to state and turns on domicile at death, and which estate-planning tools-wills, trusts, holding entities, and beneficiary designations-best protect these intangible treasures. It also covers the often-overlooked tax traps, including the rule that a creator's copyright is not a capital asset under 26 U.S.C. 1221, how the step-up in basis changes that at death, and income in respect of a decedent. Finally it addresses the digital-assets problem under RUFADAA and the Stored Communications Act. The goal is a plan that gets the right IP to the right people and keeps it earning.

Casey Scott McKayMay 1, 202454 min read

Wills and EstatesTrust Administration

Trust and Estate Administration Toolkit

Estate and trust administration is a sequence of deadlines, notices, and fiduciary obligations in which the expensive failures are almost always procedural rather than substantive. A portability election missed because no return was filed. A creditor claim period never started, leaving the estate open for years. A concentrated position held without a written analysis. Annual reports never sent, which leaves a trustee exposed for five years instead of one. This toolkit covers both roles in parallel: opening an estate and qualifying the personal representative, marshaling assets and handling creditors, the tax filings and elections, distribution and closing — and for a trustee, acceptance and the statutory notices, the investment and impartiality duties, the distribution protocol, the reporting that starts a one-year limitations clock, and the protections available to a fiduciary who wants finality.

Casey Scott McKayMay 1, 202415 min read

Wills and EstatesEstate Planning

Wills, Trusts, and Estate Planning Basics

Estate planning is not about death taxes, which affect a very small number of families, and it is not only for the wealthy. It is about who decides for you when you cannot, who receives what you own, how much of it is consumed by process, and whether the people you leave behind spend a year in court. This article explains the core documents and what each one actually does. It covers intestacy and why the state's default plan rarely matches anyone's intent, wills and their formalities, probate and what it costs, and the revocable living trust including the funding step that people skip and that makes the trust useless when they do. It explains the incapacity documents that matter more often than the death documents, the beneficiary designations and titling that override the will entirely, and guardianship nominations for minor children. A second half addresses the federal estate and gift tax framework, the step-up in basis, portability, lifetime gifting, irrevocable trusts and when they make sense, retirement account rules after the SECURE Act, digital assets, and business succession. It closes with a document checklist, a worked example, an FAQ, and related reading.

Casey Scott McKayJanuary 23, 202425 min read

Wills and EstatesTransfer Tax

The Federal Estate and Gift Tax: Exemptions, Portability, and Lifetime Transfer Planning

The federal transfer tax system taxes gratuitous transfers of wealth through three related taxes — gift, estate, and generation-skipping transfer — that share a single lifetime exemption and a common rate. Because the exemption is historically large, the system now reaches very few estates directly, which has shifted planning away from tax avoidance toward basis maximization for most families and toward aggressive lifetime transfers for the few still exposed. The mechanics that matter are the unified credit and its scheduled reduction, portability of a deceased spouse's unused exclusion, the marital and charitable deductions, and the generation-skipping tax that operates as a separate and unforgiving overlay. This article covers how the taxes fit together, the deductions and elections that shape most plans, the principal lifetime techniques and their risks, and the compliance obligations that follow a death.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 16, 202325 min read

Wills and EstatesEstate Planning

Estate Planning for Business Owners: A Practical Guide

A business owner's estate plan has to solve three problems at once, and solving one badly can defeat the others. Control must pass to someone who can run the business. The estate must have liquidity to pay taxes and to equalize among heirs, without selling the business to raise it. And the transfer should be structured to minimize transfer tax while preserving the income tax basis step-up where that matters more. This guide works through each: getting a defensible valuation, structuring and funding a buy-sell agreement including what the Supreme Court's decision in Connelly changed about redemption arrangements, the estate tax framework and the deferral provisions available to closely held businesses, the lifetime transfer techniques that actually move value, how to treat children who work in the business and children who do not, and how to align the entity documents with the estate plan so they do not contradict each other.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 3, 202325 min read