Beginning Our Discussion Of Contaminated Real Property Concerns In The Business Succession And Estate Planning Process
Posted: November 11, 2011ToxicEstateSuccession.com is a blog site our law firm has established to bring BEST PRACTICE strategies to business owners and real property investors (and to the professionals in the business and estate planning communities) to protect against the potentially devastating consequences associated with the transfer of contaminated real property upon the death of the business owner or investor. Through this site we will help ensure that the liability implications of potential soil and groundwater contamination are more regularly included as a primary consideration in the typical succession planning process for businesses and estates, especially in the context of Buy-Sell agreements, trust relationships and real property transfers at or before death.
Our firm has decades of experience dealing with environmental cleanup issues, and we long ago identified the critical need for inclusion of these environmental concerns in the estate and business succession planning process. We are particularly concerned about the typically avoidable, and often tragic, consequences we have encountered when business and estate succession planning does not include an in-depth focus on the real property contamination issues that may arise, or attach, upon the death of a business partner or family member.
We offer up this site as the beginning of a dialogue, starting in California and expanding nationwide, on how best to address these issues. As these outreach efforts begin to mature, we will work with professionals throughout California, and in other states, nationally, to encourage BEST PRACTICE PROTOCOLS, through the provision of in-person training sessions and seminars, video and audio webinars, and the publishing of articles. We expect to help train professionals and bring basic common sense advice to business and property owners themselves, and their business partners and personal beneficiaries, as a means of combatting this often devastating void that is usually left unaddressed in the business and estate succession planning process. We invite business and property owners, attorneys, accountants, insurance specialists and other professionals to join us in this quest to include environmental contamination issues in the business and estate succession planning process.
As we move forward with this outreach effort, we also invite each of you to participate by sending us your comments on this blog site, so that we can converse with you. While your posts will typically remain available only to us, we will occasionally post your blog comments, as well as our response, to further the education of our readership. However, our outreach efforts will focus mainly on our own periodic blog posts, which will each describe certain environmental contamination issues faced in the business and estate succession planning arena, ways to plan around these issues, and ways to minimize the unintended transfer of environmental cleanup liabilities to business partners, beneficiaries and fiduciaries. It is our intention to use this blog as the opportunity to begin organizing and coordinating the establishment of “working groups” in various regions throughout California and other states, to jumpstart this BEST PRACTICES approach throughout the country