Practice Areas
Serving Our Community
Our firm primarily focuses on estate planning, probate, elder law, and helping businesses, landowners, and mineral owners.
Estate Planning
Estate Planning is the process of ensuring that your belongings pass to your loved ones according to your wishes. A good estate plan also includes documents to authorize someone to make financial and healthcare decisions for you in the event of your disability or incapacity. For larger estates, the plan would also consider strategies to eliminate or minimize gift and estate taxes, or consider protective structures for beneficiaries incapable of prudently managing an inheritance.
Our firm designs complete estate plans including wills, trusts, powers of attorney, and long-term care planning. No matter your current stage of life, our attorneys can help you create an estate plan that clearly defines and implements your wishes and plans for the future.
We have experience handling all aspects of estate planning from simple wills to advanced asset and transfer tax avoidance strategies, and will work with you to create documents designed to meet your specific circumstances and desires.
We help clients with all aspects of estate planning, including:
- Wills
- Trusts
- Special needs planning
- Powers of attorney and similar documents
- Elder law and Medicaid planning
Probate
Probate of a Will is the process by which a Court accepts the validity of a Will and appoints an individual as Executor or Administrator to carry out the terms of the Will. Until admitted to probate, the property of an estate directed by a Will cannot be distributed to the beneficiaries.
Our firm helps manage the probate process, from the initial application to the final distribution of the estate.
Services also include handling the administration of the estates of those who died without a Will and helping families who do not live in Texas with the administration of their East Texas real estate.
Settling a loved one’s affairs can be an emotionally difficult undertaking, and we strive to make that process understandable and as smooth as possible.
Elder Law
As people are living longer, many face the possibility of outliving their resources and needing expensive institutional care over many years. Having to pay privately for long-term care of one spouse can leave the remaining spouse without sufficient income for their own support. In the case of a widowed or single elder, one’s retirement income may not be sufficient to fully cover nursing home care, if needed.
Our firm helps clients plan and apply for long-term care benefits, such as nursing home Medicaid, and assists our clients with the preservation of assets.
Today, you don’t just need documents that say what should happen to your belongings when you’re gone (what traditional estate planning gives you). You need help navigating the maze of Long-Term Care Planning: legal options to protect your assets, a thorough understanding of the long-term care benefits available to you, and the traps to avoid in qualifying for those benefits.
Long-Term Care Planning enables our clients to explore available sources of funds to assist with skilled nursing care and how to attain eligibility. We can craft a plan for you and your family that protects your quality of life and your assets, no matter what may arise.
Business Law
Whether you are starting a new business or have an existing business, we can advise on how to start, buy, manage, close or sell any type of business, including LLCs, LPs, Series LLCs, and other valid Texas business entities.
Our firm can assist you with the Laws Governing Texas businesses from formation to termination and any issue in between.
Oil & Gas
We help landowners with leases and surface-use arrangements.