Squillace & Associates, P.C.

Focus and practice areas

Squillace & Associates, P.C. is a boutique law firm in Boston that works in life, estate, and business planning. The office sits at 20 Park Plaza in the Back Bay. The firm's client base covers local, national, and international matters.

The planning work splits into a few clear layers. Estate planning covers wills, revocable trusts, and charitable giving. Advanced estate planning covers irrevocable trusts and asset protection. Estate, gift, and GST tax matters get their own heading on the practice page.

Life planning is the label the firm uses for elder law, disability, Medicaid, and prenuptial agreements. That grouping tells you something useful about how the attorneys think. These matters arrive together in real families, and the firm treats them as one body of work.

Beyond the plan itself

The firm handles probate and estate administration, so the relationship can continue after a client dies. It also offers urgent planning, which matters when a diagnosis or a travel date compresses the timeline. Mediation is listed as a separate service.

On the business side, the firm does general counsel work, helps clients establish a business, and handles succession planning. In my opinion the pairing is a sensible one.A closely held business is often a large asset in an estate, and the two plans have to agree with each other.

Who the firm sets out to serve

Four concentrations appear on the firm's own pages: LGBTQ clients, international estate and business planning, professionals such as physicians and business owners, and independent trustees. High net worth families are named on the home page as part of the client base.

The LGBTQ concentration carries real technical weight in estate work. Marriage recognition, adoption status, and the treatment of non-marital partners all change how a trust or a beneficiary designation performs. Planning for these families often means drafting that anticipates challenges rather than assuming default rules will hold.

The international concentration points at a similar problem from a different angle. Cross-border estates involve assets governed by more than one legal system, and treaty provisions can decide which country taxes what. Forced heirship rules in civil law countries can override a US will's distribution scheme. Reporting duties on foreign accounts and foreign trusts run alongside the planning itself.

Independent trustees

Naming independent trustees as a concentration signals work on the administration side of trusts. An independent trustee is a person or entity without a beneficial interest, brought in to make discretionary distributions, manage investments, and keep records. The role exists partly for tax reasons and partly to lower the temperature in families where a relative holding the purse strings would create friction.

How the team is built

The site lists eight attorneys: Scott E. Squillace, Brian C. Olson, Brett J. Barthelmeh, Heather A. Reid, Carol Sneider Glick, William H. Schmidt, Colleen A. Noonan, and John E. Zurek. The firm describes its practice as intentionally small.

That phrase does some work. Eight attorneys covering elder law, tax, probate, trust drafting, business formation, and mediation means most of these lawyers carry more than one area. Clients in a firm this size usually deal with the same small group across years, which suits planning work where the file gets revisited after marriages, births, sales, and deaths.

The firm holds licences in other jurisdictions and works with attorneys around the country through a network. For a Boston office handling national and international estates, that arrangement matters. Real property is governed by the law of the state where it sits, so a client with a house in Massachusetts and a condominium in Florida needs someone admitted in both places, or a reliable way to reach one.

What the record shows

The copyright line on the firm's pages reads 2007 to 2026. The site does not state a founding year, so as a reviewer I take that range only as evidence of how long the current firm has published under this name.

The firm keeps a Facebook page and a LinkedIn company page. Contact runs through a form on the website. Office hours are weekday business hours.

What the site does not carry is as informative as what it does. There are no case results, no settlement figures, no ranking badges. Estate planning generates few public outcomes by design, and a firm doing this work has little to display in that format.

Practical context for the work the firm names

Some notes on how these matters generally proceed, offered as background rather than as claims about this firm.

Massachusetts probate runs through the Probate and Family Court. A personal representative files the will, gives notice to heirs and devisees, inventories the assets, pays creditors and taxes, and distributes what remains. Informal probate can move quickly; formal probate involves a judge and takes longer. Revocable trusts are often used to keep assets out of that process entirely, though the trust still has to be funded during life for that to work.

Massachusetts levies its own estate tax with a threshold well below the federal one, which is why the state's planning market looks different from most. Federal estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer taxes are tracked through lifetime exemption amounts that Congress has changed repeatedly. Planning documents drafted for one set of thresholds usually need review when the numbers move.

MassHealth long-term care eligibility involves an asset test and a five-year look-back at transfers. Irrevocable trusts used for that purpose have to be set up well before care is needed, and the terms decide whether the assets count. Prenuptial agreements sit in the same planning family because they fix property expectations before assets combine.

Business planning stages

Establishing a business means picking an entity, filing with the Secretary of the Commonwealth, and drafting the operating or shareholder agreements that govern the owners. General counsel work then covers contracts, employment questions, and the decisions that arise once the business runs. Succession planning addresses what happens when an owner retires, dies, or wants out, often through buy-sell agreements funded by insurance or by valuation formulas agreed in advance.

Reading this listing

The clearest signal here is coherence. Every service the firm names belongs to one arc: plan the assets, plan the business, handle the tax, administer what follows. In my opinion that consistency is worth more to a prospective client than a longer menu would be.

Clients who want a large firm with departments for litigation, real estate, and regulatory work will look elsewhere. Those with an estate that crosses borders, a family structure that default rules handle badly, or a business that needs to survive its founder will find the firm's stated concentrations line up with those facts. The site names eight attorneys and describes the practice as intentionally small.