Kate Willcox

Kate’s practice focuses on foundational and complex estate and gift planning, tax planning, and post-death trust administration. She has extensive experience working with blended families, same-sex couples, unmarried couples, and families with special needs. Additionally, she works with clients to structure irrevocable tax-planning trusts, including grantor trusts, ILITs, GRATs, SLATs, QPRTs and charitable trusts. Her tax practice includes preparing estate and gift tax returns and representing clients in estate and gift tax audits, as well as advising clients regarding California real property tax planning. Kate also advises clients regarding business succession planning by designing and structuring plans to efficiently and effectively transfer family businesses to the next generation, as well as “estate freeze” transactions to ease the tax burden of doing so. In addition to estate and tax planning, Kate has extensive experience advising fiduciaries in post-death trust administration. She advises trustees regarding the valuation, allocation, tax reporting, and distribution of assets while also managing family dynamics and expectations.

A native of Ohio, Kate enjoys spending time with her family in the endless California sunshine, gardening, and crossword puzzles. She also loves trivia and achieved a lifelong goal in 2021 when she appeared as a contestant on Jeopardy!