Bob Kleinknecht counsels clients and their families on multi-generational planning. He helps families create wealth transfer strategies and succession plans that are tax efficient — but are also practical and workable solutions the family can live with. Bob works closely with clients and their families to ensure that their planning accomplishes their goals in an intuitive and understandable manner.
In addition, Bob has administered a wide variety of probate estate and trust settlement matters. He frequently advises corporate and family-member executors, personal representatives, and trustees in the efficient and prudent management of post-mortem affairs.
Bob also has extensive experience with single-family office structuring, planning, and operations, having served more than eight years as in-house counsel for a Forbes 400 family in New York and Florida. He has designed and implemented numerous partnership and corporate structures to help investors and family offices make their investing more tax-efficient, including flow-through and profits interest/carry planning. In related work, Bob was a primary drafter of legislation in Florida that charters private family trust companies under Florida law.
In the philanthropic realm, Bob has drafted numerous private giving agreements with major public charities covering naming opportunities, shared medical research, and scholarship and endowment funds, to name a few. He has also helped establish and operate private foundations and public charities — counseling clients from initial setup through ongoing operations using best practices. He also has expertise with other tax-favored charitable giving techniques such as charitable remainder trusts (CRTs), charitable lead trusts (CLTs), and donor-advised funds (DAFs).
Bob has prepared and reviewed innumerable tax returns, and typically works closely with clients’ accounting professionals and tax preparers on these returns. These include gift, estate, and generation-skipping tax returns, as well as fiduciary (trust/estate) income tax, partnership, corporate, and private foundation tax returns. This experience helps clients identify the real-world pitfalls that can be missed during the planning stages.
Bob is admitted to practice law in Florida and Massachusetts, and has a Martindale-Hubbell AV-Preeminent® rating. Before founding Oakstone, Bob served as in-house counsel to a single-family office, as noted above. Previously he served high-net-worth clients as an estate planning and probate attorney with prominent firms in Chicago, Boston, the District of Columbia, and Naples.
