Biography

Scott Squillace is a business and estate planning attorney with over 31 years of experience practicing law. He is the principal and founder of a boutique estate planning firm in Boston’s historic Back Bay.

Scott began his practice career as a corporate attorney at Skadden Arps where he assisted in opening its Paris and Moscow offices in the early 1990’s. During his time at Skadden he did significant private and public company corporate and securities compliance work as well as international transactional work from the firm’s Washington, D.C., New York and Hong Kong offices in addition to Paris and Moscow. In addition to working on public company mergers and acquisitions, Scott assisted the corporate finance group with public debt offerings for a variety of international companies, in the form of ADRs (American Depository Receipts). He became accomplished in 1934 Securities and Exchange Act compliance work and advised a variety of public companies concerning the Act. When stationed overseas in the firm’s Paris and Moscow offices, he became adept at assisting U.S. companies establish their presence abroad, including working on a variety of joint ventures in Eastern and Central Europe at the time those markets were transitioning from planned to market economies.

Scott has significant business counseling experience as an in-house corporate attorney, first as General Counsel for Levi Strauss & Co.’s European division based in Brussels and later as the first General Counsel for Grand Circle Travel, a privately held Boston based travel company. He also served as European Counsel for Cabot Corporation in Boston, a NYSE public company. He lived and worked in Europe for nearly 10 years and has travelled for work extensively in Asia, Latin America and Africa. During that time, his practice focused on antitrust and European distribution/competition matters; intellectual property and employment law, as well as general corporate and tax matters.

Scott’s current practice focuses on estate and business planning matters including tax and philanthropic planning for high net worth individuals and families. His practice includes asset protection and estate planning needs for international clientele, corporate executives, small business owners, physicians, attorneys and other professionals. He has a particular focus on helping same sex couples and members of the LGBTQ community with their unique planning needs and frequently lectures locally and nationally on this topic. In 2014 he published the first planning guide after the landmark Supreme Court decision on same sex marriage: Whether-to-Wed: A Legal and Tax Guide for Gay and Lesbian Couples.

In addition to his planning practice, which has included sophisticated techniques for high net worth families, he also assists with governance for their complete multigenerational families. He has become a trusted advisor and frequently serves as a fiduciary for his clients. In addition, his practice includes considerable work in the area of probate and other post-mortem settlement work.