Overview
Our Tax practice group represents clients seeking to form, reorganize, and liquidate both public and private business entities. We also handle tax litigation and have successfully represented clients in substantial tax controversies with the Internal Revenue Service and the Florida Department of Revenue. We have experience guiding clients through the wide array of tax issues that confront corporations, partnerships, limited liability companies, individuals, trusts and estates.
We also counsel clients in the design, implementation and operation of employee pension plans, including 401(k) plans and ESOPs, welfare benefit plans, such as life and health insurance plans, and equity-based and performance-based executive compensation plans.
Additionally, we represent individuals with respect to the broad array of tax issues that they face. Our clients include foreign investors in the United States, and American investors abroad. In addition, we have served as counsel for a wide range of tax-exempt organizations.
Our Trust & Estates practice guides clients through the complexities of planning a will or trust. Because this often evokes the anxieties and emotions associated with having to consider one’s own eventual death, we are sensitive to this fact and strive to inspire the confidence of all those involved. We strive to anticipate potential problems in probate or guardianship situations and to structure an estate plan which minimizes such problems.
Several of our Trust & Estates attorneys has received an advanced law degree in taxation, and each is admitted to practice before Florida’s probate courts in both uncontested administrative matters and probate litigation. We provide legal counseling, plan for possible disability, offer disposition and tax planning, and prepare complex legal documents.
- Banking & Financial Institutions
- Bankruptcy
- Business & Individual Tax Planning
- Employee Benefits
Stearns Weaver Miller’s Employee Benefits practice counsels employers in the design, implementation and operation of employee pension and welfare plans and executive equity and deferred compensation programs. We also represent employers before the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Labor in the matters of initial and continuing tax qualification and audits of plans. We advise employers on handling employees’ claims for benefits, as well as strategizing the defense of any claims. Further, we have considerable experience providing tax advice and services to tax-exempt organizations in their efforts to provide competitive benefits to diverse groups of employees.
Our lawyers have handled significant and sophisticated ERISA litigation on behalf of employers, plan administrators, trustees and individual defendants. We have handled the defense of numerous types of claims, including claims for severance, disability and other welfare benefits; claims for benefits under ERISA top hat plans, such as supplemental executive retirement plans; claims for breach of fiduciary duty against corporate board members, internal benefits appeals committees, and trustees; claims of procedural and substantive violations under ERISA plans; discrimination under ERISA § 510; and claims for executive benefits and stock options.
We have litigated ERISA cases in state court, federal district court, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and have briefed issues to the United States Supreme Court. Our Employee Benefits lawyers have experience with issues of ERISA exhaustion of administrative remedies requirement and futility issues, ERISA preemption, statute of limitations issues (regarding both fiduciary and non-fiduciary claims), distinguishing between fiduciary and settlor functions, issues relating to the appropriate standard of review and plan administrators’ conflicts of interest, interpretation of plan amendment, termination, vesting, accrual and anti-cutback provisions, remedies available for technical procedural violations, delegation of fiduciary and claims administration functions, ERISA’s church plan exemption, and attorney-client privilege issues. - Estate & Trust Litigation
- Estate & Wealth Transfer Planning
- Executive Compensation
- FDOR Sales & Use Tax Audits & Disputes
- Guardianships
- Insurance
- International Tax
- IRS Controversies
- Mergers & Acquisitions
- Probate Administration
- Real Estate
- State & Local Sales Tax
- Tax-Exempt Organizations
- Trust Administration
- Trusts & Estates
Stearns Weaver Miller’s Trust & Estates practice guides clients through the complexities of planning a will or trust. Because this often evokes the anxieties and emotions associated with having to consider one’s own eventual death, we are sensitive to this fact and strive to inspire the confidence of all those involved. We strive to anticipate potential problems in probate or guardianship situations and to structure an estate plan which minimizes such problems.
Each of our Trust & Estates attorneys has received an advanced law degree in taxation, and each is admitted to practice before Florida’s probate courts in both uncontested administrative matters and probate litigation. We provide legal counseling, plan for possible disability, offer disposition and tax planning, and prepare complex legal documents.
We also work closely with other professionals, such as physicians, accountants, stockbrokers, realtors, appraisers, corporate trustees, insurance agents, financial planners, and other attorneys in the Firm on estate matters which require expertise in unrelated areas.
Publications:
Trust Banking: Who’s the Boss? Navigating the Trustee-Guardian Relationship
Florida Banking|October 2023|Hannah E. Murphy, Kelly A. O'Keefe
Publications:
Trust Banking: The Florida Family Trifecta
Florida Banking|May 2023|Hannah E. Murphy, Kelly A. O'Keefe
Publications:
The Season of Giving... to Your Ex-Spouse
Florida Banking|December 2022|Kelly A. O'Keefe
Publications:
Tipping The Scales With Florida Community Property Trusts: Do The Rewards Outweigh The Risk?
Florida Banking|September 2022|Christopher R. Clark, Kelly A. O'Keefe
Publications:
The Trustee's Tightrope - Balancing the Conflicting Interests of Income and Remainder Beneficiaries
Florida Banking|July 2022|Kelly A. O'Keefe
Firm Announcements:
28 Stearns Weaver Miller Lawyers in 12 Practice Areas Ranked In Chambers USA 2022
June 2022
Firm Announcements:
Tax Shareholder Albert A. del Castillo, Jr. Joins Stearns Weaver Miller
May 2022
Publications:
Who Pays A Trustee’s Attorneys’ Fees?
Florida Banking|May 2022|Kelly A. O'Keefe