Estate Planning Services
Lau Legal Services helps families with Estate Planning Services such as:
Powers of Attorney & Incapacity Planning
Estate Tax & Cross-Border Planning
Probate & Estate Administration
Wills & Trusts
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A will or trust is not just paperwork. It decides who controls your assets, who receives them, and how much conflict your family may face later. We help clients build estate plans that are clear, practical, and designed to work when life gets messy.
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The worst time to choose who can act for you is after you no longer can. Incapacity planning puts the right people in place before a medical crisis, cognitive decline, or sudden emergency forces the issue. We prepare documents that help families avoid confusion, delay, and unnecessary court involvement.
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After someone dies, families often discover that “simple” estates are not simple at all. Probate can involve court filings, creditor issues, asset transfers, tax questions, and family tension. We guide executors and families through the process with structure and clear next steps.
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Estate tax and cross-border issues can turn a good plan into an expensive problem. This is especially true for Massachusetts families, non U.S. citizen spouses, foreign assets, and U.S. property owned by nonresidents. We help clients identify hidden exposure before the IRS, the state, or a probate court forces the conversation.
Estate planning gets more complicated when family, assets, or ownership cross borders. A house in the U.S. with children overseas. Parents in another country and children here. A non-citizen spouse. Foreign real estate. U.S. property held by non-resident family members. Estate plans built around assumptions from another country that do not work under U.S. law. This is where generic estate planning advice usually fails.
Many families are told “just put the property in the child’s name” or “everything passes to the spouse tax free.” That advice is often wrong. And often very expensive.
A green card holder, a visa holder, and a non-resident parent do not play by the same tax rules. A U.S. citizen spouse and a non-citizen spouse do not receive the same estate tax treatment. A foreign parent owning U.S. real estate may have a completely different estate tax exposure than they expect.
Massachusetts adds its own problems. Many families are surprised to learn that estate tax planning here starts much earlier than they assumed. A plan that works federally can still create unnecessary Massachusetts estate tax, forced sales, or liquidity problems at exactly the worst time.
These are not details to figure out after someone dies. That is when families start fighting, banks start freezing access, and the IRS and DOR start asking questions. By then, planning is over. Now it is damage control. I approach estate planning from both the legal and tax side, because an estate plan that creates the wrong tax result is not good planning. It is expensive paperwork.
I do not build estate plans for the version of life where everyone stays healthy, agrees with each other, and answers emails on time. I build plans for real life. For incapacity. For business interruption. For blended families. For cross-border assets. For the 2 a.m. phone call nobody expected.
The goal is simple: Protect the family. Preserve the assets. Avoid unnecessary tax. Make sure the plan works in the real world, not just on paper. International families do not need generic estate planning. They need a plan built around their lifestyle and how they actually live.