Attorney James Spica Elected a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation

Dickinson Wright PLLC is pleased to announce that Attorney James Spica has been elected a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. The Fellows of the American Bar Foundation is an honorary organization of attorneys, judges, law faculty, and legal scholars whose public and private careers have demonstrated outstanding dedication to the welfare of their communities and to the highest principles of the legal profession. Membership in The Fellows is limited to one percent of lawyers licensed to practice in each jurisdiction. Members are nominated by their peers and elected by the Board of the American Bar Foundation.

Mr. Spica is a Member in Dickinson Wright’s Detroit office. He focuses his practice on estate and tax planning, trust banking, and trust litigation. He is the principal author of Michigan’s Personal Property Trust Perpetuities Act of 2008 and of the tripartite trust-decanting regime enacted as 2012 Michigan Public Acts Nos. 483, 484, and 485. He is the American Bar Association (ABA) Advisor to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws' Drafting Committee on Divided Trusteeship and served on the ad hoc committee of the ABA Real Property, Trust and Estate Law Section that drafted the Section's response to the Treasury Department's request (IRS Notice 2011-101) for comments on the tax implications of trust decanting.

Mr. Spica is a Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC), a member of the ACTEC State Laws Committee, a former member of the Council (governing body) of the Probate and Estate Planning Section of the State Bar of Michigan (2006-2015), and a current member of the Probate and Estate Planning Advisory Board of the Michigan Institute of Continuing Legal Education. He has an LL.M. (in Taxation) from New York University, was clerk to the Honorable Richard C. Wilbur on the United States Tax Court (1985), and taught taxation, trusts, and decedents’ estates as an Assistant/Associate Professor of Law at the University of Detroit Mercy (1989-2000, tenured 1996).

About the American Bar Foundation
The American Bar Foundation’s mission is to serve the legal profession, the public, and the academy through empirical research, publications, and programs that advance justice and the understanding of law and its impact on society. Created by the American Bar Association more than sixty years ago, and supported by annual grants from the American Bar Endowment, the ABF is an independent, non-profit organization that conducts large-scale research projects on the most pressing issues facing the legal system in the United States and the world. Research at the ABF is conducted by a residential research faculty and over 50 affiliated scholars from across the nation and the world. The ABF is the largest recipient of grants from the Law and Social Science Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), where the ABF has an 85% success rate in applications compared to an overall success rate of 21% in the social and economic sciences. In the following areas and more, the ABF is a thought leader and a source of research that is shaping policy. To learn more about ABF, please click here.