Thomas Steelman

Journey to the Law

I have been working in estate planning since before I started law school. In the summer of 2021, before my first year at Miami, I joined an estate planning firm in Annapolis, and I returned every summer after that. By the time I graduated, I had spent three summers drafting trusts, researching tax provisions, and helping structure SLATs, GRATs, and ILITs for high-net-worth families. I built my legal education around the tax side of estate planning, and today my practice is focused on taxable estate planning. 

So what is taxable estate planning? The federal government taxes estates above a certain size, currently about $15 million per person or $30 million for a married couple, at rates of up to 40%. Taxable estate planning is the work of reducing or eliminating that tax, along with related gift and income taxes, so more of what a family has built passes to the people they love instead of to the IRS. That work relies on tools like spousal lifetime access trusts (SLATs), grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs), irrevocable life insurance trusts (ILITs), and carefully structured lifetime gifts. Done well, it can save a family millions of dollars. 

In practice, taxable estate planning is much more than drafting documents. I work with families to coordinate their estate, gift, and income tax planning as one strategy: deciding how and when to use their estate and gift tax exemptions, which assets to move out of the estate and which to keep for a step-up in basis, how to structure family businesses and real estate holdings, and how their gifts are reported to the IRS, including reviewing my clients’ gift tax returns. Every decision affects the others, and my job is to make sure the whole plan fits together. 

Although I am a younger attorney, taxable estates are the core of my practice, not a side project. I handle taxable estate matters for clients across all of our firm’s Middle Tennessee offices, and I have designed plans for estates reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars, for families with real estate spread across several states, and for owners of closely held businesses. I am proud that clients with significant wealth trust me with some of the most important decisions they will make for their families. I take that trust seriously, and I have worked hard to earn it. Along with my classical education, much of what I know about tax planning I taught myself, through years of reading books on advanced estate and tax planning and researching every new technique I come across, and I have not stopped learning since. 

I have a passionate dislike for taxes, and I have found that the best way to put that passion to use is to help my clients save on estate and gift taxes. When people think of attorneys, “creative” may not be the first word that comes to mind, but in estate planning, creativity matters. I take pride in looking at a complex estate and designing a plan that produces the most tax-efficient outcome for my clients and their families. I was honored to be named to Super Lawyers’ 2026 list of Rising Stars for the Mid-South, and I genuinely enjoy helping families plan for the future.