Estate and Trust Law and Employee Benefits: Ms. Simanek is a partner in the firm’s Private Client practice area with a focus on estate and trust law. She handles all aspects of estate planning and settlement, including the interaction between employee benefits and an individual’s estate. Ms. Simanek counsels clients on tax planning, business succession planning, and elder law issues, and administers large estates. One aspect of her practice includes analyzing the impact of, and implementing, estate planning strategies such as QPRTs, GRATs, multigenerational trusts, disclaimers, transfer of stock options, family limited partnerships, and split dollar arrangements. She drafts documents associated with such strategies, as well as wills and a variety of trusts, including credit shelter trusts, revocable trusts, irrevocable “Crummey” trusts, defective grantor trusts, and Florida “flite” trusts. Ms. Simanek has devoted a portion of her practice to integrating retirement plan assets into an estate plan and focusing on elder law issues.
Prior to joining K&L Gates, Ms. Simanek worked for Mellon Bank for 15 years and served as a Vice President Product Manager with responsibility for developing and managing a wide variety of banking products for the financial management of small business, middle market and large corporate customers. She was responsible for a complete line of products for small businesses - deposit accounts, employee benefit programs, cash management services, investment products, and information reporting techniques. In addition, her responsibilities included the management of business deposit operations.