Harry F. Lee works with clients in the areas of estate planning, estate administration, family business succession planning, and charitable organizations, with a focus on the tax aspects of such areas. For example, his experience in estate planning helps families minimize gift, estate and generation-skipping transfer taxes through the use of tax efficient vehicles such as generation-skipping trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts, charitable remainder and lead trusts, etc.

In addition, clients rely on Harry to provide advice on complex family wealth management vehicles such as family limited liability companies and look to him to provide innovative solutions for such issues as how best to fund premiums on life insurance policies held by insurance trusts. He also specializes in counseling private foundations on avoiding punitive excise taxes and in providing advice on tax-advantaged methods of charitable giving.

• Harry has handled a variety of sophisticated estate planning, estate administration and nonprofit legal matters and clients, including:
• Developing and implementing an integrated plan to pass a family business to the next generation through gifts, GRATs, sales, and charitable contributions, even while using family business assets to fund life insurance for the senior generation.
• Advising an illiquid estate on how to obtain loans from other family entities so as not only to provide funds to pay estate taxes, but to create a valuable deduction in the computation of such estate taxes.
• Developing and implementing a private annuity design for an infirm client to minimize her estate for estate tax purposes.
• Developing and implementing a qualified severance of a generation-skipping trust to most efficiently minimize the generation-skipping transfer tax implications for the resulting trusts.
• Advising hedge fund managers on how best to make gifts of their interests, as well as how best to enable their private foundations to invest in their managed funds while avoiding excess business holding, self-dealing, and jeopardy investment excise taxes on such investments.

• Author of various articles on tax and estate planning topics in such magazines as Taxes and Tax Notes.
• Speaker and written outline presenter at various seminars sponsored by Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education; Boston Bar Association; and the New England Regional Meeting of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel.

• Was an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Suffolk University for more than 15 years teaching undergraduate classes such as Ethics, Informal Logic and Postmodernism

“I think of myself as primarily a puzzle solver. My quantitative skills plus my academic interest in logic have proven quite useful in helping clients navigate the intersection of complex tax and wealth management issues. Not to say the objective analytic approach is the only way to help clients reach satisfactory resolutions, but providing that perspective on such issues as part of a legal team effort has proven very useful to clients in my experience. I’m not the star quarterback, but hopefully I’m a pretty good center.”