Melissa Spievack

Melissa Spievack focuses her practice on private client and family wealth planning, counseling clients on a variety of business and tax matters. Her background in tax and estate planning enables her to bring a creative, but practical approach to her clients' legal concerns, and her emphasis on understanding clients' business models enables her to meet their needs. Ms. Spievack routinely advises clients on estate planning; estate and trust administration; premarital planning; planning for retirement assets; charitable giving; and planning for income, estate, generation-skipping transfer, and gift taxes.

In addition, Ms. Spievack also counsels cross-border clients on pre-immigration planning, including foreign and domestic trust issues, and U.S. clients on planning for assets in foreign jurisdictions. She also counsels clients on trust and estate litigation matters, including trust accountings, will contests, guardianship proceedings and actions for construction, and reformation of trusts and wills.

Ms. Spievack also has significant experience advising non-profit entities, including counseling foreign and domestic tax-exempt organizations on formation, obtaining tax-exempt status, state charitable registration, and ongoing business, corporate governance and tax compliance issues. She is a certified chartered advisor in philanthropy and has extensive experience advising large, domestic and international charitable foundations (including both public charities and private foundations) on a variety of matters, such as interfacing with state attorneys general, taxation authorities and the IRS.

Ms. Spievack routinely counsels private foundations on issues related to required annual distributions, self-dealing transactions, compensation arrangements, jeopardizing investments, excess business holdings and taxable expenditure transactions (including the exercise of expenditure responsibility). She has also advised numerous private foundations regarding the termination of private foundation status, including through conversion to public charities, the sale/disposition of substantially all a foundation’s assets, and foundation mergers and reorganizations.