By Dr. Tamara Patzer
In brief: Good advisers can still produce a bad result when they do not talk. A New Orleans tax attorney describes the pattern of conflicting instructions between estate, tax, and investment professionals, and how a coordinating arrangement, which some families call a family office, keeps the pieces from colliding when a sale or a transfer is near.
Picture a successful owner with three capable advisers. The estate attorney drafts a trust. The accountant models a sale. The investment manager plans how to deploy the proceeds. Each memo is sound. Put side by side, they do not fit. The trust assumes a closing date that the accountant has moved, and the investment plan assumes cash that the trust will hold. Nobody was careless. Nobody was in the room together. Todd M. Villarrubia, a New Orleans attorney who focuses on tax and estate planning, wrote Entrepreneurial B.E.A.S.T. Mode™ in part to describe how this happens and how to prevent it.
What Does The Collision Look Like?
The book offers a concrete example of advisers working apart: “The estate attorney might structure a generation-skipping trust that conflicts with the family’s planned liquidity event.” A liquidity event is a sale or other moment when paper value becomes cash. A trust designed without knowing its date can hold the wrong assets in the wrong form at the wrong time.
The author’s broader complaint is about a pattern. “The estate attorney drafts documents but doesn’t coordinate with the tax strategy.” That is not an accusation of poor work. It describes a division of labor in which each professional is paid for a piece, and none is paid to watch the seams.
Why Do The Seams Matter In A Sale Year?
Because several rules turn on dates and holding periods. The IRS says long-term capital gains are taxed at 0, 15, or 20 percent, and an asset must be held for more than one year to qualify. A transfer, a gift, or a restructuring that shifts the timing by a few weeks can change which side of that line an asset falls on. The exact effect depends on the facts and on advice the family should take from a tax professional.
Estate rules add another layer. The IRS lists $15,000,000 per person as the federal basic exclusion amount for people who die in 20261. A sale can raise a family’s liquid assets sharply in a single year, which changes the estate picture even when the owner has made no other change.
Who Is Supposed To Watch The Seams?
In most households, nobody. The owner assumes the advisers are coordinating, and each adviser assumes someone else is. The book names the missing piece directly. It says a family should ask “not whether they can afford coordination, but whether they can afford to operate without it”. The remedy is not a better adviser. It is a role, filled by a person, that exists to keep the others aligned.
That role can take several forms. It may be a lead attorney who convenes the others. It may be a trusted professional inside the company. For larger families, it may be a family office. What matters is that someone has the job and the authority to ask every adviser the same question at the same time.
How Should A Coordinated Team Work In Practice?
Start with a shared calendar. Every major event, such as a closing, a gift, a trust funding or a tax filing, goes on one page that all advisers can see. Add a short list of open questions and who owns each. Hold a standing meeting, even a brief one, in the months before a sale.
The author puts the standard simply: the attorney, the accountant and the financial adviser should work as partners. He is direct about what happens otherwise. “Estate planning strategies could be ineffective because your attorney doesn’t understand your business structure.” In plain terms, a plan drawn without the facts is a plan that may not work.
What Does The Family Office Add?
For families who need more than a standing meeting, a family office adds capacity. The book describes the idea this way: “Imagine a team of experts, each specializing in a crucial area: taxes, law, investments, insurance, and business strategy.” The team shares information and works from one set of facts.
Villarrubia is also careful to say that the arrangement is not required for everyone. A small household may manage with a lead attorney and a quarterly meeting. A larger one may need staff. The right size depends on the number of moving parts, not on a fixed wealth threshold.
How Concentrated Is Wealth, And Why Does It Matter Here?
Very concentrated, which is part of why these conflicts show up at the top. The Federal Reserve’s distributional accounts, reported through FRED, put net worth held by the top 1% at about $60.3 trillion in the second quarter of 20263. Families at that scale often hold assets in many forms and places, which makes the seams between advisers more numerous.
But the problem is not limited to the very wealthy. An owner with a single company and a modest estate can face the same collision, on a smaller scale, if the lawyer and accountant have never compared notes.
What Can An Owner Do This Quarter?
Four steps are practical and inexpensive.
- Put every planned transaction, gift and filing on one dated list.
- Share that list with every adviser, in writing.
- Ask each adviser what they would change if another adviser’s plan moved by a month.
- Name one person who calls the group together when something changes.
If an adviser objects to being asked to coordinate, that is useful information about whether to keep working with them.
What Mistakes Recur?
The first is assuming the advisers talk. The second is treating coordination as a one-time project and not a habit. The third is waiting for a sale to begin, when the key decisions have to be made earlier. A family that avoids all three has made most of the difference without hiring anyone new.
Common Questions
Do I Need A Family Office To Coordinate Advisers?
No. Many owners start with a lead attorney and a shared calendar.
What If My Advisers Refuse To Cooperate?
That is a reason to consider changing advisers. A licensed attorney can help you decide.
Does Coordination Lower Taxes?
It can help avoid conflicts that raise them, but no arrangement can promise a particular tax result.
Sources
- Internal Revenue Service, What’s New: Estate and Gift Tax
- Internal Revenue Service, Topic no. 409, Capital Gains and Losses
- Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts, Net Worth Held by the Top 1% (FRED)
About the author. Dr. Tamara Patzer is a publisher and former newspaper editor. She was on the staff of The Charlotte Sun when it was named a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for its Hurricane Charley coverage.
About the source. Todd M. Villarrubia is an attorney with an LL.M. in Taxation and a Juris Doctorate. He is an Accredited Estate Planner, a Board Certified Expert in Estate Planning and Administration, and a Fiduciary Investment Advisor Representative. He is the author of Entrepreneurial B.E.A.S.T. Mode™. Wealth Planning Law Group, 101 W. Robert E. Lee Blvd., Ste 404, New Orleans, LA 70124. Phone: 504-982-8207; email: todd@lawealthplan.com; website: Wealth Planning Law Group
Disclaimer: Attorney advertising. Sponsored feature written on behalf of Todd M. Villarrubia. This article is general information, not legal or tax advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Results vary.
