October 21, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Two trusts-and-estates lawyers who specialize in helping charity donors hold the dubious distinction of being included in Bloomberg Personal Finance magazine’s “Loophole Hall of Fame” (November).
The lawyers, Conrad Teitell and Douglas K. Freeman, were featured along with nine other prominent lawyers whom the magazine honored for their ingenuity in “creating new ways to shelter assets from the Internal Revenue Service.”
Mr. Teitell was cited for championing and refining the use of charitable remainder trusts for more than 30 years. With such trusts, donors give to a charity appreciated stock or other assets and, in return, receive tax breaks and annual income; after a period of years, assets left in the trust go to the charity.
“It’s an engine that grows all the time, without paying tax,” Mr. Teitell tells the magazine. And, the article says, a well-managed trust can yield even more income for the donor than the same assets earned before the gift was made.
The article goes on to give Mr. Teitell, head of the planned-giving group at Cummings & Lockwood, in Stamford, Conn., credit for coining the very phrase “planned giving.” Not a shabby legacy for someone also considered the father of the phrase “bad-heir days.”
Mr. Freeman gets credit for coming up with an innovative estate-planning technique, which he dubbed the “wealth-replacement trust.” The idea is that a tax-free trust can be created to take care of donors’ estate taxes so that wealthy individuals will feel more comfortable giving their money to charity.
At least a handful of other lawyers with a charity bent to their practices are included in a list of nearly five dozen trusts-and-estates lawyers noted at the end of the article for their professional achievements.
Among them: Carolyn C. Clark, a New York lawyer who is called “a guru on charity issues,” and Donald A. Goldsmith, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s general counsel.
The article is available on the magazine’s Web site at http://www.bloomberg.com/personal.
