Terry L. (T. L.) Turnipseed

Terry L. Turnipseed, who goes by T. L., is a tax, trust and estate planning attorney and Head of Estate and Tax Planning at Alta Trust Company, a South Dakota trust company serving ultra-high-net-worth families and their advisory teams. He designs and oversees dynasty trusts, asset protection trusts and directed trust structures, and works as contract and of counsel attorney to law firms and private wealth platforms on complex planning, technical memoranda, opinion letters and transfer tax reporting. He has spent more than twenty-five years advising families, fiduciaries and their advisors on estate, gift, generation-skipping and fiduciary income tax planning, advanced trust design and cross-border private client matters. Before returning to private practice in Florida, he was a tenured Professor of Law at Syracuse University College of Law for eighteen years, teaching wills, trusts and estates, estate and gift taxation, fiduciary law and charitable planned giving. Earlier he practiced estate planning at Covington and Burling LLP and was an estate, gift and trust taxation specialist in the national tax office of Deloitte and Touche LLP in Washington, D.C. He is the author of the Bloomberg BNA Tax Management Portfolio on the spouse's elective share, lead author of the Heckerling Institute chapter on elective share and community property planning, co-editor of the book Community, Home and Identity, and author of law review articles cited by courts, scholars and the Florida Legislature. He holds a J.D. and an LL.M. in Taxation (cum laude) from Georgetown University Law Center, master's degrees in Nuclear Engineering and in Technology and Policy from MIT, and a B.S. in Nuclear Engineering, summa cum laude, from Mississippi State University. He is a Certified Trust and Fiduciary Advisor (CTFA), a Harry S. Truman Scholar and a National Science Foundation Fellow, and is admitted to practice in New York and the District of Columbia. He lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and writes at turnipseed.law.