Albert M. Fortier, Jr.

Director 

afortier@rackemann.com

Tel: 617-951-1153
Fax: 617-542-7437

- Philanthropy- Trusts and Estates

 

Education

Bar and Court Admissions

• Commonwealth of Massachusetts
• U. S. District Court, District of Massachusetts
• U. S. Supreme Court

Practice Focus

“Al” Fortier has counseled families and fiduciaries for nearly 50 years.  He specializes in trust and estate law, estate planning and charitable planning.   He focuses on the preservation of family assets, particularly in the devolution of wealth to younger generations.

Background

Mr. Fortier joined the firm in l976 after 16 years of practice with a small Boston law firm.  He serves on the firm's Trust Investment Committee and Profit-sharing Plan Committee.

Administration of Trusts and Estates

Mr. Fortier serves as a trustee of many family trusts and charitable trusts, and has attended to the administration of numerous estates.  He works with families to avoid and resolve controversies over wills and other estate and trust matters.

Estate Planning

Using his extensive experience in estate tax and generation-skipping tax planning, Mr. Fortier works to conserve family assets of senior clients and their descendants. 

Affiliations

Elected to the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel in 1978, Al served as Massachusetts State Chair for a number of years, and is currently a member of the Estate and Gift Tax Committee and the Charitable Planning and Exempt Organizations Committee.  He also has served as chair of the Probate Section of the Boston Bar Association.  He has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America since 1991.

Community Service Activities

Mr. Fortier is a Life Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, a corporator of Boston Biomedical Research Institute.

He has served as a hearing examiner for the Board of Bar Overseers.  For many years he was an elected Town Meeting Member of Brookline and served as chair of the Redistricting Committee.  He is counsel to the Crown Prince Frederik Fund which provides scholarships for Danish students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and has served as counsel and trustee of the Phi Gamma Delta Educational Foundation. He is a past president of the Friends of the Boston University Libraries and was on the Board of Visitors of the School of Theology. He is a former trustee of the West Suburban YMCA.

Publications

Al has lectured at the Federal Tax Institute of New England, the American Law Institute-American Bar Association, Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education, the Boston and Massachusetts Bar Associations, Boston Estate Planning Council, Mass. Bankers Association and other organizations on estate planning topics, including the generation-skipping tax, personal residence trusts, grantor retained interest trusts, charitable trusts, Massachusetts estate tax reform, and the tax on transfers to non-citizen spouses.  His articles on the generation-skipping tax have appeared in national estate planning publications.  Also, he is the author of a chapter of the Massachusetts Probate Manual.