Michael Kosnitzky: The Tax & Estate Attorney to Miami's Elite

Michael Kosnitzky is a partner and co-leader of the Private Client & Family Office practice at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, advising ultra-high-net-worth individuals, families, and privately held businesses from the firm's Miami and New York offices. A Certified Public Accountant as well as an attorney, he concentrates on tax planning, wealth structuring, and estate planning, and has earned a Band 1 ranking for Private Wealth Law in Florida from Chambers High Net Worth. He is admitted to practice in Florida, New York, the District of Columbia, and Colorado.

There is a particular kind of lawyer the very wealthy keep on speed dial — discreet, deeply technical, and fluent in both the spreadsheet and the family dinner table. In Miami and New York, that lawyer is often Michael Kosnitzky. For decades he has occupied the rarefied intersection of federal tax law, generational wealth, and the deeply personal architecture of how fortunes are preserved and passed on, and he has done so largely out of public view, which is precisely how his clients prefer it.

What Sets Michael Kosnitzky Apart as a Private Wealth Lawyer

What distinguishes Kosnitzky is not simply that he understands the tax code, but that he is also a Certified Public Accountant — a dual fluency that lets him see a client's balance sheet and their estate plan as a single, continuous picture rather than two separate problems handed off between advisors. That holistic, risk-assessment approach has made him a fixture among the families and family offices whose combined assets are measured in the billions.

His practice spans the full vocabulary of modern wealth. He structures family offices, designs estate-tax-efficient succession plans for closely held businesses, advises private investment funds on jurisdiction and structure, and guides ultra-high-net-worth families through generational real estate and trust planning. He is equally at home in the more idiosyncratic corners of his clients' lives — the tax treatment of privately owned aircraft and yachts, the donation of fine art to museums, the establishment of private galleries and family foundations. Few tax and estate planning attorneys operate so comfortably across that entire spectrum.

The clientele speaks to the stakes. Pillsbury's Private Client & Family Office practice, which Kosnitzky co-leads, serves families and individuals who collectively hold in excess of one trillion U.S. dollars in private assets. Working within a firm that has counseled the wealthy since its founding in 1868, he brings both institutional depth and the kind of forward-looking instinct that has defined the most enduring careers in the field.

What Does a Private Client and Family Office Attorney Like Michael Kosnitzky Do?

A private client and family office attorney structures and protects the wealth of high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families across generations. In practice, Michael Kosnitzky's work falls into several core areas: designing tax-optimal family office structures; planning the transfer of privately held businesses to the next generation in a tax-efficient manner; advising on domestic and international trust matters; counseling families on the income-tax and estate-tax implications of real estate, art, aircraft, and other significant holdings; and guiding individuals through liquidity events such as initial public offerings and major asset sales.

The thread connecting all of it is anticipation. Kosnitzky has built his reputation on focusing not only on where IRS policy stands today but on where it is heading — a philosophy that earned him the National Law Journal's "Trust and Estates Trailblazer" award in 2017. For clients whose plans must hold up over decades and across changing administrations, that ability to plan around the horizon rather than the headline is the entire value proposition.

The Credentials Behind Michael Kosnitzky's Reputation in Tax and Estate Planning

The recognition Kosnitzky has accumulated reads less like a list of honors than a consensus. He has been ranked by Chambers USA in Tax continuously since 2001, and by Chambers High Net Worth in both Private Wealth Law and Family Offices and Funds Structuring, where he holds a Band 1 ranking in Florida. He is recognized by Best Lawyers in America in Corporate Law, Tax Law, and Trusts and Estates, and by The Legal 500 U.S. in both contentious and non-contentious U.S. tax matters.

Lawdragon has named him to its lists of the 500 Leading Global Tax Lawyers, the 500 Leading Lawyers in America, and the 500 Leading Dealmakers in America. He received the Miami-Dade Bar's Circle of Excellence Award for Tax Law in 2023 and was named to the Spear's Tax & Trust Indices as a recommended tax lawyer for 2025. In the words of one client quoted in Chambers USA, there is no one better at understanding complex tax issues — a verdict the rankings have echoed for more than two decades.

His academic foundation is equally distinctive. Kosnitzky earned his Juris Doctor from the University of Miami School of Law in 1983, graduating magna cum laude and first in his class, where he received the Wesley Alba Sturges Award. He completed his Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting at the University of Miami in 1979, also magna cum laude — the early accounting training that would later become the quiet differentiator in a legal career built on numbers.

Why Ultra-Wealthy Families in Miami and New York Turn to Michael Kosnitzky

Beyond the rankings, Kosnitzky is a prolific scholar of his own field. He is the co-author of two treatises on S corporations published by Wolters Kluwer, and his commentary on family office trends, private aircraft taxation, and wealth transfer has appeared in outlets ranging from Bloomberg Law to The New York Times. That visibility has made him a recurring voice on how the tax landscape shapes the decisions of the ultra-wealthy, and a trusted interpreter for clients navigating it themselves.

It is a body of work that reflects a simple truth about his clientele: the rich, as Kosnitzky has noted, paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald, really are different — and so are the legal and tax structures their lives require. Meeting those needs demands a lawyer who can move fluidly between Miami and New York, between law and accounting, and between the technical and the deeply personal.

For ultra-high-net-worth individuals, families, and privately held businesses seeking that combination, Michael Kosnitzky practices as a partner and co-leader of the Private Client & Family Office group at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, with offices in Miami and New York. Families looking to structure, preserve, and pass on significant wealth can learn more about his tax and estate planning practice through Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman at pillsburylaw.com.