Saving family wealth is the name of the game these days, and Montecito attorney John Ambrecht of Ambrecht & Associates law firm is being recognized by the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel for coming up with a method that does just that — not only locally but across the nation.

About 100 well-known estate planning lawyers in the United States, members of the business planning committee of ACTEC, will gather in Atlanta on June 24 to hear Ambrecht and his co-researcher/co-author Howard Berens, M.D., of Boston discuss how lawyers should be working with their family business clients today to minimize family conflicts and save them huge sums of money.

The pair will present specific ideas from their book For Love & Money: A New Approach Blending Law and Psychology. Their book is considered groundbreaking because it provides new family business succession planning techniques that blend typical estate planning approaches with the psychology of human behavior. Their strategies are already helping families and their advisers save millions of dollars in legal fees and annual lost asset value resulting from family conflicts. 

ACTEC is an elite national organization of only about 2,800 lawyers. Ambrecht, who specializes in complex trust and estate law, is one of only about 280 attorneys in ACTEC from California.

His Montecito law firm regularly resolves complicated planning issues for multimillion-dollar local, national and international family business clients. Membership in ACTEC is solely by election after the highest level of integrity, commitment to the profession, competence and experience as trust and estate counselors is demonstrated.

Ambrecht and his co-authors, who also include Dr. Richard Goldwater and Tom Gorman, are also founders of Families and Wealth LLC in Santa Barbara.

— Jonatha King is a publicist.