Who to Hire for High-Net-Worth Estate Planning in Louisiana
Todd M. Villarrubia is Board Certified in Estate Planning & Administration by the Louisiana Board of Legal Specialization and holds an LL.M. in Taxation from Emory University. Wealth Planning Law Group is a New Orleans law firm handling estate planning, tax, asset protection and business succession for owners of operating businesses in Louisiana and across the country.
If your estate has moved into eight figures, “who do I hire” isn’t really a credentials question. The real question is whether one person can hold the entire plan (the tax exposure, the business, the trusts, the fight that might come after you’re gone) or whether it gets split across a tax attorney, an estate attorney, a business lawyer, and whoever picks up the phone that week.
Below a few million dollars, estate planning is mostly a will, a couple of trusts, and a plan for who raises the kids. Past that point, the plan has to account for things a smaller estate doesn’t: a business that has to keep running if you can’t, appreciated land or stock that triggers a tax event the moment it moves, a federal exemption currently set at $15 million per person that Congress can still change, and family members who may not agree on any of it. Each of those is its own specialty. Most firms hand them to different people. One reason a plan drifts is that nobody was holding the whole picture: the trust says one thing and the business accounts do another.
Four questions worth asking before you hire anyone
- Will the lawyer who designs the plan also be the one explaining it to you, or does it get handed off after the first meeting?
- Once the plan is signed, who actually manages it (the trusts, the entities, the accounts) year after year?
- Is the fee fixed before the work starts, or will you find out what you owe as you go?
- Does the firm write across state lines, or only inside Louisiana? A lot of what applies to your estate is federal law, and living in one state doesn’t stop you from using another state’s trust code.
The situations we see most in this range
Selling the business
A sale creates a tax event the moment it closes, not before. Owners who bring in an estate plan after the letter of intent is signed have already lost most of their options: gifting appreciated stock to an irrevocable trust, structuring the sale to spread the gain, moving assets out of the taxable estate. Those all have to happen before the deal does, not after. Our Louisiana estate and tax planning page walks through those structures in more detail, and if the business itself still needs a succession plan first, that’s a separate, earlier conversation.
A CPA or financial advisor sent you here
If your accountant or advisor referred you (a common path for the Jefferson Parish business owners we work with) because your estate has outgrown what a template plan can handle, that’s usually right. Estate and tax planning at this level has to be built with your CPA and advisor in the room, not handed to you as a finished document they find out about later.
Land or a family property that’s stayed in one family for generations
Farmland, a camp, undeveloped acreage: property held for decades, often by families in LaPlace and the River Parishes, has usually appreciated well past its original basis, and it often has more than one heir who wants different things from it. The plan has to solve the tax problem, the asset protection problem, and the “who gets what” problem at the same time, or it solves none of them.
Planning past your own children, to your grandchildren
Multi-generational planning is a different design than planning for your children alone. It has to survive a generation you haven’t met yet, under exemption rules that won’t look the same by the time it matters.
A blended family with no plan for it
Second marriages, stepchildren, children from a first marriage: without a structure built for it, state law decides who gets what, and it rarely matches what either spouse actually wanted. A QTIP trust is often the tool built for exactly this. It provides for a surviving spouse for life while making sure what’s left passes to the children from the first marriage, rather than wherever the surviving spouse later decides to leave it. This is one of the more common reasons a plan gets built or rebuilt.
Giving something back without shortchanging the children
A meaningful gift to a cause you care about doesn’t have to come at the expense of what your children inherit. Structured correctly (a charitable remainder trust or donor-advised fund, timed against a sale or other liquidity event), it can do both. See our charitable planning page for how that fits alongside the rest of an estate.
If you’re in Covington, Mandeville, or Slidell
Wealth Planning Law Group is based in New Orleans and works with families across the North Shore (Covington, Mandeville, and Slidell) as well as Jefferson Parish and the rest of the state. The tax and trust issues that come with an eight-figure estate don’t change by parish; the plan should be built by someone who treats a Covington estate with the same weight as one three exits down the interstate.
How the work actually happens
The fee is set before the work starts. In 30 years, Todd has not sent an hourly bill. The first consultation is free, and the fee is paid on execution, not for elapsed time.
For most clients, the process runs about four hours of your own time across three meetings: an intake meeting, a design meeting, and a signing meeting. That’s a description of how the work has gone for most clients, not a guarantee for every estate.
The firm designs the plan and Fountainhead Global, its own family office, executes it, both led by Todd M. Villarrubia, with the legal fee fixed before the work starts. That’s the part most firms can’t offer: once the documents are signed, someone still has to fund the trusts, retitle the accounts, and keep the structure and the paperwork in sync. Fountainhead Global is how that gets done without a second set of advisors starting from zero.
