David A. Berek is a partner in Mayer Brown's Chicago office. With nearly 30 years of experience as a lawyer and tax accountant, and a multidisciplinary approach to wealth management, he was recognized as the top private client planning professional by Family Office Review in 2015. Mr. Berek also teaches as an adjunct professor in DePaul University's Master of Science in Taxation graduate program. Mr. Berek assists wealthy families, high net worth individuals, corporate executives and privately owned family businesses in advanced wealth planning, and devises transfer tax planning strategies for sophisticated partnerships and family office structures. His practice covers grantor trust planning, lifetime taxable transfers to generation-skipping transfer tax exempt trusts, self-cancelling notes, private annuities, GRAT's, BDIT's and BDOT's. He also assists in creating and maintaining charitable remainder trusts, family foundations, pre-immigration planning and expatriate planning, as well as creating and maintaining DISC structures and, where appropriate, coordinating DISC's with wealth transfer planning.