Senior Estate Planning Attorney - Strategic Legacy Architect
Acorn Financial Services · Reston, VA · 2 days ago
On-siteLegalFull-time
The Mission
At Acorn Financial Services, our unyielding focus is on the financial and personal well-being of our clients, managing over $1.4 billion in assets across thousands of accounts. For ultra-high-net-worth individuals, business owners, and corporate executives, basic estate planning is woefully insufficient. They require strategic, impenetrable legacy architecture. As our Senior Estate Planning Attorney, you will serve as the definitive legal authority within our integrated stewardship team. Your mission is to solve the most complex multi-generational wealth transfer challenges, navigate massive liquidity events, and provide professional fiduciary oversight, ensuring our clients' most vital assets are protected across generations.
Who You Are
- A master of scale and complexity, navigating every conceivable permutation of estate, trust, and gift tax law over the past fifteen-plus years.
- Architect proactive, systemic solutions to prevent legal problems from materializing.
- Elevate the technical competence of the entire firm through active mentoring of junior attorneys, paralegals, and financial advisors.
- Build deep, enduring relationships with high-net-worth clients and their families, guiding them through emotionally fraught complexities of inheritance, succession planning, and wealth transition.
- Lead with sincere candor, addressing legal vulnerabilities and guiding clients toward optimal, legally sound solutions.
What You Will Do
- Design and seamlessly implement highly sophisticated estate plans, including complex multi-generational planning, family business succession, advanced charitable planning, and robust asset protection strategies.
- Serve as the definitive senior legal voice in highly complex client scenarios, specifically guiding executives and business owners navigating equity compensation, liquidity events, or intricate business sales.
- Oversee, review, and refine the legal strategies executed by junior attorneys and paralegals. Provide the final, authoritative review on highly complex irrevocable trusts and sophisticated tax mitigation structures.
- Work in lockstep with Acorn's managing partners, senior wealth advisors, and in-house CPAs to build unified plans that ensure every single decision is dynamically optimized against both taxes and inflation.
- Stay at the forefront of federal and state tax law shifts, actively educating the broader advisory firm on how impending legislative changes will impact our high-net-worth client base.
How We Measure Success (Outcomes)
- Drive the successful closing, implementation, and retention of complex legacy plans for the firm's top-tier, highest-AUM clients.
- Measurably increase the efficiency of the wealth advisory team by proactively identifying legal vulnerabilities in existing client portfolios and presenting immediate architectural solutions.
- Successfully scale the operational and technical capabilities of the legal support team (junior attorneys and paralegals) through structured mentorship, reducing the bottleneck on senior review time.
We Offer
- A highly visible leadership role within a respected, $1.4B+ AUM fiduciary firm.
- An operational infrastructure to allow you to do your best work; we handle the operational scale and administrative burden so you can maintain total focus on high-level strategy and client relationships.
- A culture that rewards high standards, disciplined execution, and winning together as one unified team, backed by an elite compensation and benefits package.