Family properties—personal residences, vacation homes or retreats, plots of land—are often clients’ most valuable assets. The recent recovery in real estate prices has brought renewed focus on how to preserve the value of these properties for later generations and obtain certain tax benefits while they are used by the family. Planning for these properties involves liquidity issues, integration with larger estate plans, family squabbles over emotionally important properties, income tax issues while renting them out or otherwise using them, and issues involving conservation easements and charitable giving. This program provides you with a practical guide to estate planning for important family properties, including uses of qualified personal residence trusts (QPRTs) and LLCs, alternatives to QPRTs, tax issues of rentals, and other considerations.

The long-standing model of fee-for-legal service is slowly eroding as clients target legal costs and budgets for reduction. In addition to conventional contingency fee arrangements, there has been a rise in “success fees” in transactional and litigation practice. Flat-fee arrangements are increasingly common in transactional representations. But these and other more exotic arrangements raise substantial ethical issuer for lawyers, including the requirement to zealously represent a client’s interest, ownership of flat fees, the absolute right of clients to terminate representations, the reasonableness of success fees, and many other issues. This program provides you with a practical guide to ethical issues when attorneys and clients agree to alternative fee arrangements in litigation and transactional practice.

There is often a tension between religious organizations—churches and church-affiliated groups such as child care centers and health clinics—and civil law. Unlike other nonprofit organizations, they have specifically faith-based missions that may run counter to the patterns of civil law—or have special exemptions from it. This includes tax and real estate law, health care law, and principles of nonprofit governance, employment law, and the First Amendment. The array of issues confronting these organizations can be bewildering. This program provides you with a real-world guide to the law of religious organizations, including discussions of employment, health care, tax, First Amendment, governance, and civil litigation issues.

Trusts are meant to endure, but shifting circumstances can take a substantial toll on their assets, their tax and legal status, their ability to make distributions, or even their survival. The law may change in ways that adversely impact a trust. Beneficiaries may develop intractable conflicts that jeopardize the trust’s stability. Assets may underperform, and the cost of administering a trust may make it uneconomical. And sometimes trusts may just no longer have a purpose. In these and other circumstances, trustees, beneficiaries, and their advisers struggle to find ways to reform or recast trusts to make them viable again or to dissolve them and distribute their assets. This program provides you with a practical guide to the circumstances giving rise to trust reformation and practical techniques for fixing broken trusts.

Business entities—corporations, LLCs—are not absolute shields against liability for their owners. An individual shareholder’s or LLC member’s assets can be reached in a surprisingly large number of circumstances to satisfy the claims of creditors, tort claimants, disgruntled shareholders, and others. An entity’s owners can be held individually liable for improper distributions, certain transfers made before a bankruptcy filing, and a range of federal and state taxes—including the failure to proper collect state and local sales taxes. This program is a guide to the circumstances when a veil can be pierced under statutory and common law, ways to defend against individual liability, and how to “cure” the circumstances giving rising to veil-piercing.

How do you take one of the most complicated bodies of law in the U.S.—the Uniform Commercial Code—and make it not only comprehensible but entertaining? Attending this seminar is the only way to find out! The UCC governs virtually every phase of a transaction in goods, as well as payment systems used in these transactions and in commerce generally. Robert LeVine, author of The Uniform Commercial Code Made Easy, will provide you with a solid working knowledge of the meaning of the text of the UCC. Develop an understanding of how the various articles of the UCC fit together. Gain key strategies for drafting documents and litigating matters within the scope of the UCC. Attorneys with this knowledge will have a significant advantage at every phase of a transaction governed by the UCC, whether it is transactional, in litigation, or during the ongoing business process.

The most accurate way to describe what is involved in being a practicing lawyer and running your own law office is, “it’s complicated.” This seminar will help uncomplicate matters by providing you with legal ethics best practices and practical advice for handling law office responsibilities. From where to go for ethics advice to forming the attorney-client relationship, you will receive guidance about a number of key issues, including a lawyer’s duties to a client, handling conflicts, ending the attorney-client relationship, and maintaining a level of professionalism. Don’t miss this opportunity to ask questions and get answers from the bar’s ethics experts.

The 14th Annual Tax Institute offers an outstanding faculty on hot topics for tax practitioners. Federal income tax developments will be covered in depth, and you will hear about significant national and Oregon SALT developments. Learn the latest about the 0.9% additional Medicare tax on wages and self-employment income, such as tax liability trigger points, the rules, special complications, and refund opportunities. Gain an overview of grantor retained annuity trusts, including ways to present the effectiveness of GRATs to clients. Discuss structuring considerations when a partnership or tenants in common are involved in a Section 1031 exchange. Our experts will demonstrate how LLCs and disregarded entities can be used to solve tax issues, explore the IRS’s treatment of conservation easements, and examine the federal tax consequences and pitfalls of converting entities under a variety of state statutes. And what happens when tax professionals cross the line? Find out with a review of the civil and criminal penalties.