Estate law has become so complex that what an attorney calls his or her practice in the field has to have a certain precision.

PARHAM

(Photo: Lance Murphey)

Attorney Michael R. Parham knew what he meant when he called his practice Parham Estate Planning. He opened the firm in 2009 after several years at Harris Shelton Hanover Walsh PLLC.

He recently changed the name of his practice to Parham Estate Law.

“I wanted to make it clear that I limit my practice to estate planning and probate,” he said of his first choice. “Then I started to realize what people think of when they hear estate planning is different from what I thought it meant.”

They expected financial planning and investments.

“I had people thinking I was a brokerage company,” he said.

Parham, who earned his law degree from Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville,

chose estate law after initially working for a Knoxville law firm that was heavy on litigation.

“I could not stand it. I hated litigation,” Parham said. “I didn’t like the conflict and all of that. I was doing some probate and I liked that.”

He left to work in development at Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tenn. He specifically worked with college donors in estate planning.

“I like working with families, helping them solve their problems. There’s really no conflict so to speak. You’re helping them deal with their issues,” he said.

Parham earned his master’s degree in estate planning from the University of Miami Law School to go further in work that had involved some fundraising and ultimately waiting on another attorney to complete the work he had started.

Parham is certified in Tennessee as an estate planning specialist. He recently was licensed to practice law in Arkansas, expanding a practice that already included Tennessee and Mississippi. And Parham is a member of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel.

“As long as I can make a living just doing this, I have no desire to branch out into any other areas,” he said of a field that deals with the complexity of laws and the complexity of families.

“The tax planning – that’s not even the majority when you talk about estate planning. The bigger part is you’ve got asset protection. You’ve got special needs planning. You’ve got divorce planning,” he said. “People ask me all the time, ‘What happens if my kid gets divorced? Is he going to lose his inheritance?’ You can plan for that kind of thing. You can plan for it if he has a business that goes under, what will happen to his inheritance.”

As part of the Tennessee Bar Association, Parham has been in on discussions with legislators about the state’s gift tax and possibly raising the Tennessee inheritance tax exemption, which is now at $1 million. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam this week proposed raising it to $1.25 million and eventually raising it to match the $5 million federal exemption.

“They say estate planning must be pretty simple now. It’s not,” Parham said. “The family dynamic just keeps getting more and more complicated. Every family is different. You can’t just have a boilerplate thing. … Every family is as individual as people are. … Even if the estate tax went away completely you would still have complex issues.”

That’s not to say federal tax law is without its political vagaries.

“It jumps around so much. We have no idea what’s going to be the federal law in 2013,” Parham said. “We know what it’s scheduled to be. But it’s very unlikely that (Congress) will let that happen without changing something.”