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The American College of Trust and Estate Counsel
The American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, (ACTEC) is a nonprofit association of lawyers, judges and law professors. Members of ACTEC, known as “Fellows,” are elected to membership by their peers on the basis of their professional reputation, demonstrated exceptional skill, and substantial contributions in the fields of trusts and estates law, tax law, estate planning and related legal specialties by lecturing, writing, teaching and participating in national, state and local bar association activities.

ACTEC Fellows advise clients, serve as judges or teach in one or more of the following areas: planning for the orderly and tax-efficient transfer of wealth during life and after death and preparing all related estate planning documents; administering trusts, decedents’ estates, guardianships, conservatorships and other family entities; planning for incapacity and elder concerns; planning for employee benefits; planning charitable gifts; advising tax-exempt organizations; asset protection and handling tax controversies, fiduciary litigation and other probate matters.

There are more than 2,600 ACTEC Fellows who practice or teach throughout the United States, Canada and other foreign countries. The College is organized as an American 501(c)(6) tax-exempt nonprofit corporation under the laws of the State of Delaware.

History
ACTEC was founded in 1949, as the “Probate Attorneys Association.” In 1959, the name of the organization was changed to “The American College of Probate Counsel” and in 1990, the name of the organization was changed to “The American College of Trust and Estate Counsel.” In 2010, ACTEC relocated its national headquarters to Washington, D.C. from Los Angeles, California.

Mission
The mission of the College is to maintain an association, international in scope, of lawyers skilled and experienced in the practice of trust and estate law and the related practice areas mentioned above to: serve as an educational source in those areas; study, improve and reform probate, trust, and tax laws, procedures, and professional responsibility; bring together qualified lawyers whose character and ability contribute to the achievement of the purposes of the College; and cooperate with bar associations and other organizations with similar purposes.

Meetings
The College holds an annual meeting of the members each spring. At this meeting, members of the Board of Regents are elected and other College business requiring a vote of the Fellows is transacted. National meetings are also held each year in summer and fall.

Membership
There are six classes of membership of the College: Fellow; International Fellow; Academic Fellow; Judicial Fellow; Honorary Fellow; and Retired Fellow.

To be eligible to be elected as a United States Fellow, a candidate must be a lawyer who is licensed to practice in the highest court of any state or jurisdiction of the United States, who practices in a jurisdiction within the United States, and who has not less than 10 years experience in active private trust and estate legal practice, three of which immediately and continuously precede and are continuing at the time the nomination is submitted and the candidate is elected.

International Fellows can be elected to the College under the criteria applicable to United States Fellows, or if they have 10 years experience in active private trusts and estates legal practice in the foreign jurisdiction in which they practice. Academic Fellows must be full-time teachers at an accredited law school with a minimum of 10 years experience in private trusts and estates law practice or as an instructor of trusts and estates law, or a combination of both. A Judicial Fellow is a Fellow of the College who has been elected or appointed to the bench.

A practicing lawyer is not eligible for membership in ACTEC unless he or she meets the criteria for membership and is nominated by at least two Fellows of the College. Nominees are subjected to careful review by both state and national membership selection committees. Admission to ACTEC requires an affirmative vote of the regents of the College.

Leadership and Governance
ACTEC is governed by 39 Fellows, known as “Regents,” who are elected by the voting Fellows. The Board of Regents elects the officers of the College.

Committees
At the heart of the College are its committees. The governance-type committees include Executive, Nominating, Membership Selection, Financial Management, Audit, International Membership, Communications, and Bylaws and Manual. There are also several standing committees actively devoted to consideration of recent developments, trends and ideas for best practices in specialty areas within the disciplines of the College. These committees include Asset Protection, Business Planning, Charitable Planning and Exempt Organizations, Elder Law, Employee Benefits in Estate Planning, Estate and Gift Tax, Fiduciary Income Tax, Fiduciary Litigation, International Estate Planning, Legal Education, Professional Responsibility, State Laws, Technology in Practice, and Transfer Tax Study. Special committees are formed from time to time in response to legislative or other developments which affect the practice areas of Fellows.

State Chairs
Each state in the United States, and the District of Columbia, has a State Chair, except for New York, which has an upstate and a downstate chair. State Chairs coordinate the nomination of potential Fellows to the College from within their states, and may also organize state or regional level meetings of Fellows apart from national ACTEC meetings. Canada has three regional Chairs.

Government Relations
ACTEC offers technical comments about tax and other substantive and procedural laws which affect the practice of trust and estate law at a federal or state level; however, the College does not take positions on matters of policy or political objectives.

One of the central purposes of ACTEC is to study and improve trust, estate and tax laws, procedures and professional responsibility. ACTEC and its Fellows file amicus briefs in appropriate cases, testify before Congress, provide in-depth analysis of administrative positions to the Internal Revenue Service, assist in the development of best practices for trust and estate lawyers, and participate actively in the development of the recommendations being promulgated by the International Financial Action Task Force.

In January 2011, ACTEC’s Washington Affairs Committee was thanked by the staff of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Taxation for providing technical expertise in the estate and gift tax provisions contained in the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 (Pub.L. 111-312, 124 Stat. 3296, H.R. 4853), passed by the United States Congress on December 16, 2010 and signed into law by President Barack Obama on December 17, 2010.

Publications and Lecture Series
ACTEC Law Journal, published quarterly by ACTEC, is a scholarly, academic journal publishing articles which explore tax, trust and estate topics in depth, as well as those that deal with the practical consequences and applications of the rapidly changing rules in these areas of law. The Journal’s student editorial board, located at Hofstra University, is responsible for a level of verification and editing typically entrusted to law review student editorial boards. Subscriptions to ACTEC Law Journal are available to those who are not ACTEC Fellows. It is also available on HeinOnline, LexisNexis, and Westlaw.

In October 1993, ACTEC published the ACTEC Commentaries on the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (ACTEC Commentaries) to provide better guidance to estate planners regarding their professional responsibilities and how the most relevant of the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct apply to trust and estate lawyers. The project was undertaken by ACTEC, in part, because of a concern that the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct and the Comments reflected a perspective based on a litigation or adversarial model that provided insufficient guidance to estate planners regarding their ethical responsibilities. The College revised and updated the ACTEC Commentaries in March 1995, March 1999, and again in March 2006. The most recent Fourth Edition of the ACTEC Commentaries, addresses the important changes to the Model Rules made by the ABA in 2002 and 2003.

ACTEC published the ACTEC Engagement Letters, Second Edition in 2007 which includes checklists and forms which address a variety of engagement scenarios to assist lawyers in providing professional and ethical services to clients. The ACTEC Engagement Letters facilitate the use of engagement letters to enable trust and estate lawyers to competently and ethically represent their clients. It aims to increase the utility and value of the engagement letters and checklists, and to provide an improved resource for the bench and bar and a better tool for law schools in teaching ethics.

The Joseph Trachtman Lecture was first presented in 1974 to honor the memory of a Fellow who was instrumental to the College’s success and is now the keynote address at the ACTEC Annual Meeting. The Trachtman Lecture addresses trusts and estates issues as wells as the broad aspects of their social, cultural, economic and political consequences. Previous Trachtman lecturers include: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor; leading trusts and estates practitioner Ronald D. Aucutt; academics John H. Langbein of Yale Law School, Lawrence W. Waggoner of the University of Michigan Law School, and the late A. James Casner of Harvard Law School; former Executive Director of Amnesty International William F. Schulz; and Princeton economist Burton Malkiel. The lecture is published annually in the ACTEC Law Journal.

The College established the Lloyd Leva Plaine Distinguished Lecture Series in 2010 in memory of one of its most distinguished Fellows and to commemorate Ms. Plaine’s constant interest both in the continuing education of estate planners and in the fundamental policy issues that underlie the tax laws. The first Lecture, “The Politics and Policy of the Estate Tax—Past, Present and Future,” was delivered by Professor Michael J. Graetz, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, on January 11, 2011, at the University of Miami’s Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning in Orlando, Florida.

The ACTEC Symposium Series was created to be the premier academic conference series on trust and estate topics. To date, four symposia have been presented, including: “The Uniform Probate Code (UPC): Remaking of American Succession Law", (October 2011, University of Michigan Law School); “The Law of Philanthropy in the 21st Century", (October 2009, Chicago-Kent College of Law); “The Law of Succession in the 21st Century,” (February 2008, UCLA School of Law); and “Trust Law in the 21st Century”, (October 2005, Cardozo School of Law).

Mary Moers Wenig Student Writing Competition
ACTEC’s Legal Education Committee created the Mary Moers Wenig Student Writing Competition in honor of the late Mary Moers Wenig, who was a member of the Committee and a law school professor for over 30 years. The Competition is open to students at an accredited law school who author an original paper on a topic of trust and estate law. The winning article is published in the ACTEC Law Journal.

ACTEC Foundation
The American College of Trust and Estate Counsel Foundation (ACTEC Foundation) is a 501(c)(3), not-for-profit charitable organization founded in 1982. The mission of the ACTEC Foundation is: to support scholarship to improve trust, estate, tax and related areas of the law and promote education by encouraging teaching, careers and life-long learning in the area; and, to encourage civic engagement of individual ACTEC Fellows through programs and activities which serve those who are at risk and underserved. The ACTEC Foundation has funded trust and estate wills clinics at Harvard Law School and the University of Tennessee College of Law.

Collaboration with ALI-CLE
ACTEC collaborates with the American Law Institute (ALI) to present continuing legal education (CLE) programs, for lawyers on current developments in the trust and estate practice area.