Inheritance, Trusts & Estate Planning Editor
Helen O'Brien is an estate planning attorney with a Tax LLM from Georgetown Law and 16 years advising high-net-worth families on wills, trusts, and inheritance tax strategies. She practiced at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP before founding her own estate planning boutique in Washington, D.C. Helen is a member of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC) and has written extensively on stepped-up basis, portability elections, and dynasty trusts. Her work has appeared in Trusts & Estates journal and the Wall Street Journal.
Her years at Skadden focused on multigenerational wealth transfer for ultra-high-net-worth clients, where even small drafting choices in a trust document could shift millions of dollars in estate tax exposure. That experience is why Helen pushes MONEYlume readers, regardless of net worth, toward the same discipline: naming contingent beneficiaries correctly, understanding how portability elections actually work, and revisiting a plan after every major life event rather than treating a will as a one-time task.
Since founding her own practice, Helen has worked increasingly with mass-affluent families who assume estate planning is only for the wealthy — and are consequently unprepared for how stepped-up basis, state-level estate tax thresholds, and probate avoidance actually affect a mid-sized estate. Her writing focuses on translating attorney-level concepts into decisions everyday families can act on without necessarily needing a boutique law firm.
View LinkedIn ProfileJ.D., Harvard Law School; LLM Taxation, Georgetown University Law Center; B.A. Philosophy, Yale University; CFP Certificant