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.
Our philosophy
Eight centuries of common law have produced something no statute could: a way of thinking about disputes in which every decision is answerable to the ones before it. It carries the logical discipline of the civil law, and it keeps alongside that discipline the conscience of equity, so that where a rule would work an injustice there is a remedy the rule itself cannot supply. A lawyer who understands both halves is not merely applying the law. He is taking part in it.
Most of the work is quiet. A company is formed, an instrument is drafted, an estate is settled and no one outside the family ever hears of it. Yet the body of law that arranges those ordinary affairs is the same one a person reaches for when an arrangement fails, and it remains the only instrument a private citizen can set against a party with more money, more time and more patience than they have. Used properly it restores a balance that had been lost. That is not sentiment; it is the daily function of the courts.
This practice is built on the conviction that the two halves instruct one another. The lawyer who drafts an instrument should be the lawyer who defends it, because a plan written with an eye to how it will be read by someone who resents it is a better plan. The work is kept deliberately broad for the same reason: a family that needs an estate plan this year may need a guardianship the next and a sale the year after, and no month is lost bringing fresh counsel up to the facts. What this firm offers is not scale. It is continuity, and the judgment that only continuity produces.
Established
Practice areas
On every file
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 the work is grouped into ten areas, 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 practices across the boundary that separates planning from dispute, drafting the instruments in one practice area 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. Some clients retain this firm for one defined piece of work and are gone when it is finished. Others keep it on a monthly retainer so that a question can be asked before it becomes a matter, and a company too small to employ a general counsel has one anyway.
Most of the work, however, arrives through the arrangement that has no name and no end: the family or the company whose affairs return to this office over years, where the lawyer already knows the history, the instruments and the people. That is the arrangement the practice is built to support, and everything else is arranged so as not to interfere with it.
Whichever applies, it is set out in writing before the work begins, and we will tell you when a less expensive course exists, including the course of not engaging us at all.
The journal
Most of what appears under a law firm’s name is machinery. A phrase somebody might type into a search field, a few hundred words arranged around it, and a closing line advising the reader to consult an attorney. No one writes it to be read, and no one reads it.
What follows is the opposite: the answer this firm would give a client across the table, at the length the question actually deserves, including the occasions when the honest answer is that nothing need be done. None of it is advice, and reading it creates no relationship between us. It is published so that anyone deciding whether to instruct this firm can watch it think first.
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.
Client resources
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. What follows is the portal where your own record is kept, together with the registries, forms and filing systems this practice uses daily and that you are welcome to use directly.
Contact
An hour, without charge, at the principal office 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, and we will telephone you to arrange the rest. Meetings are taken at the principal office or, by appointment, at the rooms in Miami, Coral Gables, Boca Raton and Sunrise. The files, the post and the trust account are kept in Fort Lauderdale.
Fort Lauderdale · Miami · Coral Gables · Boca Raton · Sunrise
Schedule a complimentary consultation so we may begin crafting a bespoke solution to fit your unique needs.
