Daniel B. Faizakoff
Estate planning, probate, and corporate counsel, and the lawyer hundreds of families have trusted with the most personal decisions of their lives for nearly thirty years.
Why Clients Choose Dan
Dan founded this firm in 2003 to provide exemplary service to his clients. Three things define how he practices:
He listens longer than he talks. First meetings often run two hours. He wants to understand your family before he writes a single line of trust language.
He explains until you actually understand. Clients regularly tell him no one had ever made the legal pieces make sense before. That is the work he is most proud of.
He is still here. Many of his clients have been with him for over twenty years: through marriages, divorces, births, deaths, business sales, and second marriages. He drafts plans built to last that long, and he stays around to refine them.
Practice
Dan has been in practice for nearly thirty years and concentrates on three things at a very high level: estate planning, estate administration and probate, and corporate and commercial law.
On the planning side, Dan designs and executes sophisticated estate plans, including wills, revocable trusts, irrevocable life insurance trusts (ILITs), spousal lifetime access trusts (SLATs), qualified personal residence trusts (QPRTs), and dynasty trusts, all built to protect families and insulate assets from unnecessary estate and gift tax exposure. He also walks executors and grieving families through probate with patience and compassion.
On the business side, Dan serves as outside general counsel to a wide range of closely-held companies, handling entity formations, acquisitions, commercial leasing, contract drafting, and the dispute work that occasionally follows. He has appeared on behalf of clients in the highest courts of New York when litigation cannot be avoided.
Background
Dan began his career at the Law Department of the City of New York, in the Office of the Corporation Counsel and the Mayor's Office. He moved to Lester Schwab Katz & Dwyer, LLP and then to Harris Beach LLP, where he handled products liability, pharmaceutical litigation, medical malpractice defense, and mass tort cases. That work taught him how high-stakes litigation actually unfolds.
Wanting closer client relationships and more commercial work, he joined Sieratzki, Ceccarelli & Weprin, LLP, a corporate boutique led by Assemblyman David Weprin, where he built expertise in general corporate, commercial litigation, and real estate.
In 2003 he hung his own shingle, drawn to the kind of long-arc, deeply personal client relationships that big firms structurally cannot offer. Dan has counseled families and businesses ever since, often through three or four chapters of their lives.
Community
Dan supports the organizational development and pro bono legal work of Manhattan Jewish Experience and is a former Junior Committee member of Project Sunshine, which provides free programming to children facing serious medical challenges and their families. Outside the office he is a world traveler and a certified rescue SCUBA diver, which he says is excellent practice for staying calm under pressure when something goes sideways.
Selected Representations
- Represented The Trump Organization in the acquisition of the Doral PGA Championship Golf Course and Resort.
- Represented Glaxo Wellcome, then the world's largest pharmaceutical manufacturer, in multi-million dollar complex drug litigation.
- Represented Fortune 500 corporations including AIG, KFC, Porsche, Honda, Hyundai, Chrysler, and Cummins.
- Served as a member of the National Coordinating Counsel team for the Fen-Phen Multi District Litigation.
- Represented major real estate developers including Helmsley-Spear and Zaar.