Lindsey A. Kernan

Lindsey Kernan is an attorney with Holland & Knight's Private Wealth Services Group. She focuses her practice on tax and estate planning, assisting entertainers, business owners, and other high-net worth individuals and families achieve their wealth planning and preservation goals.

Ms. Kernan helps her clients design and implement fundamental estate plans as well as sophisticated tax planning techniques, such as irrevocable life insurance trusts, sales to defective grantor trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts and family limited partnerships. Ms. Kernan also assists closely held business owners with respect to organization and structure of business entities, as well as with important planning matters such as business succession and income, corporate issues and partnership tax matters. In addition, Ms. Kernan advises clients on charitable giving and planning, including the establishment and administration of private foundations and public charities and related compliance issues arising with respect to federal tax-exempt status.

As part of her practice, Ms. Kernan takes a holistic, comprehensive and personalized approach to each client's estate planning, business and charitable goals.

In addition, Ms. Kernan advises fiduciaries in a multitude of complex estate and trust administration matters, including counseling executors and trustees regarding the discharge of their fiduciary duties to beneficiaries. She prepares federal estate and gift tax returns and has counseled clients through numerous multifaceted returns for estates with complex assets and facing complicated issues. Her representation includes litigation against the estate or among beneficiaries, and she has successfully navigated clients through IRS estate tax audits.

For a number of years, Ms. Kernan's practice focused on trust and estate litigation. Her experience and in-depth knowledge of the issues that often lead to litigation prove invaluable in her estate planning practice, allowing her to prudently handle complex will and trust drafting and interpretation issues and help clients navigate through complex family dynamics. Her litigation experience also inures to the benefit of her fiduciary clients, who are frequently faced with the threat of litigation, or actual litigation, from beneficiaries or co-fiduciaries. The knowledge Ms. Kernan built during her litigation years is instrumental in advising trustees and executors in carrying out their fiduciary obligations.