Professional Activities

Colin Gershon restricts his practice to estate planning and administration law, elder law, and the law relating to tax-exempt organizations and closely-held businesses.

Colin has extensive experience in a wide variety of lifetime and testamentary techniques to transfer property with a minimum of federal and state gift and estate taxation and generation-skipping transfer taxation. He also seeks to minimize the cost of administration of decedent's estates through the use of living or revocable trusts.

Of particular interest to Colin is planning for distributions from large qualified and non-qualified deferred compensation plans and Individual Retirement Accounts and the employment of sophisticated charitable-giving arrangements, such as charitable remainder unitrusts, and the establishment of private family foundations. He is very familiar with the use of grantor retained annuity trusts ("GRATS"), qualified personal residence trusts ("QPRTS") and family limited partnerships ("FLIPS") to achieve the estate planning and business goals of his clients. He also employs irrevocable life insurance trusts designed to maximize liquidity for estates.

He counsels elderly clients on Title XIX planning, the establishment of conservatorships and the use of living wills and durable powers of attorney.

Colin often appears in Connecticut probate courts in connection with the administration of decedent's estates and provides a wide array of services to executors and trustees relating to the entire probate process and the preparation of federal and Connecticut estate tax returns. He also is highly knowledgeable in post-mortem income and estate tax planning.

He organizes and acts as corporate counsel to limited liability companies, partnerships and closely-held corporations.

Colin is a member of the Elder Law Section and the Estates and Probate Section of the Connecticut Bar Association. He has spoken at numerous seminars on estate planning, sponsored both by the Connecticut Bar Association and various community organizations.

He received his A.B. degree with honors in History from Colgate University and a J.D. degree from Washington & Lee University School of Law, where is published a comment for the Washington & Lee Law Review. He earned a Masters of Laws in Taxation degree from New York University.

Colin has been active in community affairs. He is a past president of the Board of Trustees of the James Blackstone Memorial Library in Branford, Connecticut, past President of the Rotary Club of New Haven, and current District Governor (2009-2010) of Rotary International District 7980, which encompasses the southern four counties of Connecticut.