Blaine Smith's practice is focused on high-end sophisticated estate planning, estate administration and probate litigation, including:
- Assisting very high net worth families develop an effective estate plan through sophisticated estate planning techniques.
- Meeting with multiple generations of families and help them decide the best way to protect their family wealth and to maintain family balance.
- Managing client relationships and generally serve as the family lawyer for many families.
- Preparing wills, trusts, family limited partnerships and other estate planning documents.
- Implementing complicated and technical estate planning techniques, including GRATs, CRUTs, CLATs, dynasty trusts, asset protection trusts and sales to intentionally defective grantor trusts.
- Representing estates of deceased individuals, including preparing estate tax returns, drafting disclaimers and implementing post mortem planning.
- Representing families with probate litigation matters, including negotiating settlements, drafting discovery and participating in trial litigation. Representative matters include representing the descendants of a German-Jewish art collector exterminated in World War II in an attempt to recover his art collection, representing a widow in an attempt to declare a prenuptial agreement invalid, representing fiduciaries in breach of fiduciary claims and representing numerous families in will and trust construction and interpretation actions.
- Representing large and small family-owned companies with general corporate matters and business succession issues.
- Representing numerous non-profit organizations, including public charities and private foundations, with technical organizational and tax planning.
Prior to joining the firm, Blaine practiced at Sherrard & Roe, PLC in Nashville, Tennessee.
Blaine graduated summa cum laude from the University of Tennessee in 1998 with a B.S. in accounting. He received his J.D. from Vanderbilt University Law School in 2001. While in law school, he was a member of the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law and the Business Law Society.
Blaine is a member of the American, Tennessee and Nashville Bar Associations, as well as the Estate Planning Council. He is also active in the Nashville Bar Association Estate Planning and Probate Committees.
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