Michael P. Vito

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A sophisticated planner to high net worth individuals, fiduciaries, family offices, and foundations, Mike has wide-ranging experience in tax law, high net worth estate planning, estate and trust administration, and philanthropy spanning more than two decades across multiple jurisdictions. He guides his clients through the administration and preservation of assets in ways that best protect their legacies through prudent business succession planning, multigenerational plans, and charitable giving.

With a keen focus on federal estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer taxes and fiduciary income tax planning, Mike counsels clients on the most effective techniques for the protection, management, and transfer of wealth, including through such vehicles as irrevocable life insurance trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts, and spousal lifetime access trusts.

For family offices, Mike develops custom family and philanthropic wealth transfer plans to effectuate clients’ wishes while optimizing transfer tax benefits. He designs and implements directed trustee structures and private trust companies to provide robust, multigenerational governance for families with growing trust networks. For philanthropically inclined clients, Mike provides advice on charitable gifts, private foundations, split-interest charitable trusts, excise taxes, grant-making procedures and agreements, and nonprofit governance.

Mike also advises fiduciaries on the fulfillment of their duties related to managing an estate or trust, including issues such as estate and inheritance tax returns, fiduciary accountings, concentrated position management, prudent investor act delegation, GST grandfathered trust transactions, fiduciary transitions, decanting, distribution, and wind-up strategies.

After working with Lowenstein for nearly 20 years, Mike moved to Washington, D.C., to join the high net worth family office practice group at Baker & Hostetler LLP. Beyond estate planning and trustee services, he provided innovative offerings such as living estate plan audits and detailed annual legacy management reports, including annual financial benchmarking of advanced planning techniques and projections as to transfer tax exposure and successful tax savings over time. He later rejoined Lowenstein Sandler in Washington in 2021.

Mike was a regular author of the Finseca Washington Report Marketplace, a national monthly newsletter published for a large life insurance industry trade association. During 2020, his reports addressed advanced planning concepts specifically targeted to the financial environment created in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.