Experience

Ada Clapp is a partner with more than 25 years of experience counseling high net worth individuals, fiduciaries, and family offices on a wide variety of matters. She has extensive experience advising on sophisticated income, gift, and estate tax matters, including analyzing existing plans to ensure personal goals are met tax-efficiently, creating, and administering complex trusts and trust transactions, such as grantor retained annuity trusts, installment sales, split-interest trusts, asset swaps and trust decanting. Ada is adept at leveraged gifting techniques utilizing discounted and fractional interests, as well as planning for wealth realization events and unique, illiquid assets, such as fine art. Ada has advised on charitable giving and philanthropy and counseled trustees, executors, and nonprofit directors on compliance with fiduciary principals and applicable law.

Ada also has broad experience managing and overseeing legal, operations, and compliance matters particular to family offices. She has been responsible for family office legal matters including those relating to investments, art, employment, real estate, construction, litigation, contracts, asset protection, premarital planning, estate and trust administration and accounting, among others. She has overseen governance and compliance of family trusts, foundations, and business entities. Ada has managed a myriad of family office operations matters, including the creation of a physical infrastructure, hiring staff, employee benefits and human resources, confidentiality, data security and information sharing, regulatory compliance, financial reporting, allocation of expenses and liquidity planning and insuring and safeguarding tangible property.

Previously, Ada was a partner at Berdon LLP, which joined Citrin Cooperman in 2023. Prior to joining Berdon LLP, Ada served as General Counsel of Elysium Management LLC, a family office serving multiple generations of a single family, where she was responsible for legal affairs, operations matters, and entity compliance. Ada began her career as an estate planning attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell. She later practiced at such notable firms as Debevoise & Plimpton, Schulte Roth & Zabel, and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, where she was a partner and Practice Co-head of the New York Private Clients Services group. Ada has been a managing director of the U.S. Trust Company, where she advised on wealth transfer and preservation, financial planning, retirement planning, investments, and the monetization of fine art.