Sharon Mauer is a Partner at Jorges & Bowers, LLP, where she heads the firm’s Trusts and Estates and Corporate practice groups. She advises business owners, high-net-worth individuals and families on preserving and transferring wealth, administering estates and trusts, and building and operating their businesses. With more than 20 years of legal experience, including service as general counsel to growing companies, Sharon brings a business perspective to estate planning that few trusts and estates attorneys share. Before joining Jorges & Bowers, she was a founding partner of Goldstein Mauer PLLC.

Trusts & Estates

Sharon counsels business owners, founders and high-net-worth individuals on plans that integrate their personal estate planning with their business interests. Drawing on her experience as a general counsel, she coordinates wills and trusts with ownership structures, buy-sell arrangements and succession goals, and implements wealth-transfer strategies designed to minimize estate and gift taxes and preserve assets for future generations. She also works closely with young families, a focus that began when she was starting a family of her own, helping parents build child-focused plans that provide for their children and adapt as their families grow. Sharon guides executors, administrators and trustees through every stage of estate and trust administration, from proceedings in the Surrogate’s Courts of New York, Kings, Queens, Richmond, Nassau and Suffolk Counties through asset collection, creditor and tax matters, accountings and final distribution, and represents clients in contested matters, including will contests and contested accountings. Because she sees firsthand how estates are administered and where disputes arise, she drafts plans that anticipate those issues and reduce delay, expense and conflict for the families who rely on them.

Her trusts and estates practice includes:

• Probate and administration of estates
• Trust administration and counseling executors, administrators and trustees
• Wills and revocable and irrevocable trusts
• Advanced wealth-transfer strategies, including GRATs, SLATs and lifetime gifting programs
• Business succession planning for founders, owners and family businesses
• Family limited partnerships and LLCs for asset management and transfer
• Irrevocable life insurance trusts
• Child-focused estate planning for young families
• Trusts for children and grandchildren, including education and lifetime trusts
• Supplemental and special needs trusts
• Powers of attorney, health care proxies and living wills
• Will contests and contested accountings

Corporate

Sharon brings a strong business background to her corporate practice. She served as General Counsel to two renewable energy development companies, where she oversaw the acquisition of approximately $450 million in renewable energy projects, an IPO registration, and the sale of a project valued at approximately $1 billion. She also served as Vice President and Corporate Counsel to a New York Stock Exchange-listed real estate investment trust with more than $9 billion in assets under management. She began her career as a corporate attorney at the international law firms Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal (now Dentons) and King & Spalding.

Today, Sharon counsels startups, founders, entrepreneurs and established companies on a broad range of corporate matters, including:

• Entity selection, formation and corporate structuring
• Shareholder, operating, partnership and buy-sell agreements
• Drafting and negotiating commercial contracts, strategic agreements and non-disclosure agreements
• Joint ventures and strategic partnerships
• Executive compensation, employment and human resources matters
• Outside general counsel services and strategic planning

• New York State Bar Association
• American Bar Association