Tax
The 2026 exemption sunset, and what it does not require you to do
Acting in haste is its own risk. A measured reading of the scheduled reduction, and the three circumstances in which it should change your plan.
February 12, 2026
Established 2016 · Fort Lauderdale
A boutique practice with a broad range of experience, built on relationships.
The Firm
Most people arrive here on the recommendation of someone they trust, an accountant, a private banker, a lawyer who does not handle the matter at hand. What they are looking for is not a larger office. It is the assurance that the person they meet across the table is the person who will read the documents, draft the instruments, and stand up in court when standing up is required.
That assurance is the whole design of this practice. It is deliberately small, and organised to remain so. Every matter is handled by the attorney whose name is on the door, under a department code entered in the firm’s own register, and nothing leaves this office unread. We keep what centuries of careful practice have proven, precise drafting, discretion, correspondence worth keeping, and we add only what this century has genuinely earned.
What follows is an account of how the firm is arranged: the overlapping areas of practice, the lawyer who will answer your telephone call, the terms on which we agree to work together, what we have been writing about lately, and the instruments and technology by which the work is actually carried out.
Established
Departments
Offices
Our Practice
A family’s affairs do not divide themselves neatly into disciplines. The same household may need a trust restated this spring, a guardianship petitioned for in the autumn, and a company sold the year after — and it should not have to explain itself to three firms to accomplish it.
The practice is therefore full-service and organised into ten departments, each carrying its own code in the matter register. The breadth is not an advertisement; it is the reason the lawyer already knows your family when the difficult telephone call comes, and why no month is ever lost bringing new counsel up to the facts.
Your Counsel
Joshua Michael Stahley founded this firm in 2016 on a conviction that has not since required revision: that a client of a serious practice should speak with the lawyer doing the work. He read tax law at New York University, and he practises across the boundary that separates planning from dispute — drafting the instruments in one department and defending them in another.
He is the attorney on every file the firm opens. There is no associate to whom your matter will be handed, and no letter that leaves this office unread by him.
Our Relationships
An engagement is a relationship before it is a transaction, and a relationship cannot begin well if one party does not know what it will cost. No client of this firm should have to guess at the figure, and none should ever learn it for the first time from an invoice.
Every arrangement is therefore set out in writing before the work begins — the scope, the fee, the person who will do it, and what is expressly not included. Conflicts are screened before anything is discussed in substance. Advance deposits are held in trust, applied only against statements you have already received, and returned when the matter closes.
We will also tell you when a less expensive course exists, including the course of not engaging us at all.
Our Journal
The firm writes when there is something worth saying, and does not write otherwise. What appears here is the reasoning we would give a client across the table — on a change in the transfer tax, on the accounting a trustee is about to serve, on the sequence in which a family company ought to be sold.
None of it is advice, and reading it creates no relationship between us. It is offered so that a person deciding whether to instruct this firm can see how it thinks before they ever pay for the privilege.
Acting in haste is its own risk. A measured reading of the scheduled reduction, and the three circumstances in which it should change your plan.
The formal accounting is a communication before it is a filing. How the presentation of a trust accounting shapes what follows it.
Where the firm uses it, where it does not, and the standing rule that a lawyer reads every word that leaves this office.
Our Tools
A law office is not improved by technology for its own sake. It is improved when a client can find the executed copy of their own trust at eleven o’clock at night without telephoning anyone, and when the lawyer’s attention is spent on judgment rather than on retrieval.
These are the instruments the firm actually uses, and the standing rules that govern them — including the one that matters most: a lawyer reads every word that leaves this office.
Offices
The practice is run from the principal office in Fort Lauderdale, where the files are kept and the post is received. The four other rooms exist for a plainer reason: so that meeting your lawyer is never an afternoon lost to the interstate.
They are attended by arrangement rather than staffed daily. Telephone the principal office and a room will be opened at the location nearest your home or your business — and a great deal of this work, though not the signing of instruments, is done just as well by secure video.
Contact
An hour, without charge, in Fort Lauderdale or by video. You will leave it knowing what your matter involves, roughly what it will cost, and whether it requires a lawyer at all — an answer we are willing to give honestly, because a practice this size does not need every file that is offered to it.
Tell us only as much as you are comfortable putting in writing. We will telephone you to arrange the rest.
Schedule a complimentary consultation so we may begin crafting a bespoke solution to fit your unique needs.
