Dean Mead Shareholder Lauren Detzel Recognized with Top Honors by Florida Super Lawyers

Orlando, Fla. — Florida Super Lawyers announced that Lauren Y. Detzel was selected among the “Top 100: 2015 Florida Super Lawyers” from nearly 100,000 attorneys across the state. She was also named among the “Top 50 Women Lawyers in Florida”, a recognition she has held since the inception of the publication. She has been distinguished as a top rated estate planning and probate attorney by Super Lawyers for 10 consecutive years.

Detzel is a shareholder and chair of Dean Mead’s Estate and Succession Planning department, as well as a highly regarded leader in the legal industry. She is Board Certified in Wills, Trusts, and Estates by the Florida Bar. She specializes in techniques to reduce or avoid paying estate tax such as family limited partnerships, grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs), sales to intentionally defective trusts, charitable trusts, lifetime gifts and generation skipping trusts.  Her practice includes planning for the succession of closely held or family businesses. She also handles many contested tax matters in the transfer tax area, ranging from audits of returns and administrative appeals within the IRS to Tax Court and Federal District Court litigation. She handles the entire gamut of administration of estates and trusts, including contested matters of will and trust interpretation and reformation.

As an adjunct professor for the University of Florida Levin College of Law for over 25 years, Detzel has taught an Estate Planning class and has lectured on Ethics. She is the Founding Member and Chairperson of the Florida Tax Institute, a program of the University of Florida Levin College of Law and the Florida Tax Education Foundation, Inc.  Additionally, she often speaks on a variety of trust and estate planning topics for organizations including: the University of Miami Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning, Southern Federal Tax Institute, American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, ALI-ABA, Florida Bar, and Practicing Law Institute.

Detzel is recognized for her experience and knowledge, having been repeatedly listed as an outstanding lawyer by The Best Lawyers in America, Chambers USA, Florida Trend Magazine’s Legal Elite, Florida Super Lawyers Magazine, and Orlando Magazine.  She is also the recipient of the 2005 Gerald T. Hart Award as the Outstanding Tax Attorney in the State of Florida by The Florida Bar Tax Section.  She is a former Chair of the Tax Section of the Florida Bar and a current member of ACTEC.

Detzel earned her law degree from the University of Florida Levin College of Law and her undergraduate degree from the University of Louisville.  She is admitted to practice in the state of Florida, U.S. District Court Middle District of Florida and the U.S. Tax Court.

About Super Lawyers
Super Lawyers, part of Thomson Reuters, is a research-driven, peer influenced rating service of outstanding lawyers who have attained a high degree of peer recognition and professional achievement. The mission of Super Lawyers is to bring visibility to those attorneys who exhibit excellence in practice. For more information, go to superlawyers.com.

About Dean Mead

Dean Mead is a business law firm that provides full-service legal representation to businesses and individuals throughout Florida. The firm has 49 attorneys in multiple practice areas including: tax, estate and succession planning, general commercial litigation, employment, business law, mergers and acquisitions, professional licensing, government investigations, white collar litigation, government relations and lobbying, regulatory compliance, employee benefits, bankruptcy and creditors’ rights, commercial real estate and health law. For more information, please visit deanmead.com.

# # #