Annual Professional Seminar

Carl L. King 
Womble Bond Dickinson

A partner in Womble Bond Dickinson’s Private Wealth Sector, Carl King helps clients achieve their family, financial, and estate planning goals while minimizing potential estate, gift, and income tax liabilities. He also represents foundations and public charities as an ongoing part of his practice. 

Carl has extensive experience implementing intergenerational wealth transfers using charitable entities, closely held business interests, and life insurance strategies. He has drafted and implemented hundreds of complex gift and estate tax strategies, including generation-skipping trusts, family limited liability companies, installment sales to grantor trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATS), and various charitable entities.

Carl provides regular legal counsel to trusts and estates, advising them on sophisticated tax-saving opportunities, including disclaimers, tax elections and allocations, and other related matters, and defends them in gift and estate tax audits. He also provides legal defense for trusts and estates facing substantial claims from creditors or disgruntled beneficiaries and, conversely, helps beneficiaries and other constituents protect and enforce their claims against estates and trusts. 

Carl is an active member of the legal community, both in North Carolina and more broadly across the U.S. He is a member of the American Bar Association’s Individual and Fiduciary Income Tax Committee and a fellow in the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC), serving on its Fiduciary Tax Committee. He also holds leadership positions in the North Carolina Bar Association's Estate Planning and Fiduciary Law Section Council, including Section Ethics Chair and Section Liaison to the North Carolina Banker’s Association. 

A frequent speaker and author on trusts and estates issues, Carl taught the Valuation Class at the University of Miami School of Law as an adjunct professor. In recent years, Carl’s most rewarding professional work has included co-authoring the ACTEC’s amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the U.S. in the Kaestner fiduciary income tax case; counseling families of all generations during the creation and growth of family offices; and providing legal advice on some of the largest charitable gifts in North Carolina’s history.