Richard Glenn Davis

Mr.Davis practices in the Firm’s El Paso, Texas and Las Cruces, New Mexico offices. He advises individuals and families in estate planning, transfer taxation, asset protection, and closely held and family business matters. He also advises individual and corporate fiduciaries regarding administration and taxation issues affecting trusts, estates and family-owned individuals, Mr. Davis focuses on creating complex multi-generational wealth transfer plans. His comprehensive custom plans go beyond credit shelter or bypass trusts and marital deduction planning that are the foundation for any estate plan.

Mr. Davis’s plans also include, in appropriate circumstances, full utilization of an individual’s exemptions from the generation-skipping transfer tax with a view towards creating true dynasty trusts that extend for multiple generations, if not into trusts for lifetime transfers designed either to avoid or reduce transfer taxation or to maximize available exemptions from such taxation also are a focus of Mr. Davis’s practice. These trusts include Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts, Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts and Unitrusts, Charitable Remainder Trusts, Charitable Lead Trusts, and Children’s . Davis also regularly prepares customized Family Limited Partnerships and Family Limited Liability Companies to provide a more effective means of managing the familybusiness and investments, and providing creditor protection and, potentially, valuation discounts for estate tax of the firm’s proximity to Mexico, many of Mr. Davis’s clients also have special issues because they are not either United States citizens or residents, or caused by dementia or Alzheimer’s disease also is of special concern to Mr. Davis.

Accordingly, Mr. Davis designs special provisions for living trusts to minimize the need for legal proceedings in the face of these diseases, thus easing the transition to successor trustees when help is needed. He also creates Third-Party Special Needs Trusts, which can be important for married clients and parents of children who are disabled or otherwise eligible for government benefits like part of the probate process, Mr. Davis also prepares United States Estate Tax Returns and advises the family’s accountants regarding such returns. He also assists trustees of split–interest trusts to prepare necessary information returns regarding the trust’s activities to the . Davis offers a unique perspective and expertise to his clients given that he was primarily a litigator in the Firm’s employment and commercial litigation sections for eleven years. During that time, he was lead counsel for several publicly traded companies or their subsidiaries, including Raytheon Technical Services Company; Waste Connections, Inc.; Iron Mountain, Inc.; Lear Corporation; and Union Pacific Railroad Company.

In 2005, for example, Mr. Davis successfully defended Raytheon in an international discrimination lawsuit by obtaining, first, a partial summary judgment, and then, at trial, a directed verdict against the plaintiff that was affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth law school at the University of Texas, Mr. Davis interned with Justice Lloyd Doggett of the Supreme Court of Texas ― the highest civil court in the state. He graduated with honors and was inducted into the Order of the Coif, an honor extended only to the top ten percent of graduates. Mr. Davis moved to El Paso initially to serve as a law clerk to United States District Judge Harry Lee . Davis has been active in a number of professional organizations focusing on the estate planning practice, including as a Fellow of the American College of Estate and Trust Counsel (ACTEC), the Tax Section of the State Bar of Texas (where he served as a Vice Chair of the Estate and Gift Tax Committee), the Real Estate, Probate and Trust Sections of both the State Bar of Texas and the State Bar of New Mexico (where he served on the Section’s Board of Directors as Budget Officer), the El Paso Estate Planning Council (where he currently serves on the Board of Directors), the El Paso Probate Bar and the Southern New Mexico Estate Planning Council (where he is a past-President).  He also has served on the Planning Committee for the Annual Southern New Mexico Estate Planning Institute, in Las Cruces, New Mexico.  In 2016, Mr. Davis was accepted as a Fellow in the American College of Estate and Trust Counsel, an organization of the leading estate planning and probate lawyers in the country. 

In each year beginning in 2014, Mr. Davis also has been selected as a Texas Super Lawyer in Estate Planning and Probate, an honor extended to the top 5% of Texas lawyers.  Also in April, 2009, the Community Foundation of Southern New Mexico named Mr. Davis the Rio Grande Professional Advisor of the Year.

Mr. Davis is actively involved in the community.  He volunteers with the New Mexico State University Foundation with whom he co-hosts an annual Women’s Estate Planning Conference in Las Cruces.  He also serves on the Community Foundation of Southern New Mexico Professional Advisory Committee.  He also served for six years as a member of the Board of Trustees for El Paso’s Insights Science Museum, including as Vice President.  Mr. Davis also was a participant in the Leadership El Paso Class XXIX, sponsored by the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce and also previously served as a member and vice president of Keep El Paso Beautiful, Inc., and is an active member of Beth El Bible Evangelical Free Church.