Rosemarie S.J. Sam - Honolulu, HI

Overview

Rosemarie S. J. Sam concentrates her practice in the areas of estate planning, probate and trust administration, and trust and estate litigation. She has represented clients in establishing estate plans, implementing sophisticated estate planning techniques, planning for incapacity, administering and terminating trusts and estates, and resolving will and trust controversies. She has been elected as a Fellow of the prestigious American College of Trust and Estate Counsel and was recognized in The Best Lawyers in America as 2022 Lawyer of the Year, Litigation – Trusts and Estates.

Examples of her work include:

• Basic Estate Planning: Prepared estate planning documents, such as wills, revocable living trusts, irrevocable life insurance trusts, durable powers of attorney for asset management, advance health-care directives, digital asset authorizations, designations to control disposition of remains, deeds and other conveyance documents.
• Advanced Estate Planning: Prepared documents to implement sophisticated estate planning techniques such as generation skipping trusts, leveraged gifting through the use of family limited partnerships and limited liability companies, charitable remainder trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts, qualified personal residence trusts, qualified domestic trusts, asset protection trusts, and installment sales to “intentionally defective grantor trusts.”
• Probate and Trust Administration: Counseled fiduciaries (personal representatives of probate estates and trustees of trusts) on proper administration and termination of estates.
• Trusts and Estates Disputes: Defended fiduciaries and advocated for beneficiaries in contested proceedings, including breach of fiduciary duties, financial elder abuse, undue influence, lack of testamentary capacity, and other challenges to validity of trust instruments.
• Conservatorship/Guardianship: Represented clients to establish and administer conservatorships and guardianships of incapacitated adults.

Rosemarie is the Editor-in-Chief of the Hawai’i Probate Forms Manual (4th ed.), co-author of the Hawai’i Conservatorship and Guardianship Forms Manual (2nd ed.), and co-author of “Trusts and Estate Primer”, Hawai’i Bar Journal (Nov. 2010). She was a member of the drafting committee for Hawai’i's Uniform Trust Code, which was adopted in 2022. She is also a court appointed member of the Committee on Uniform Probate Code and Probate Court Practices and a former Lecturer of Finance Estate Planning at the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawai‘i. She has lectured on a range of topics, including trust and estate administration, fiduciary duties, estate planning, conservatorships, preventing estate litigation through estate planning, planning for and administering digital assets, and asset protection planning. Rosemarie was selected as a member of Pacific Business News’ “Forty Under 40” Class of 2011.