Washington Asset Protection Attorney

Watch: what happens to a Wyoming LLC in Washington

If you've been researching Wyoming LLCs or a Nevada or Alaska trust, start here. I walk through Washington's statutes and case law, and what actually holds up for a Washington resident.

Who I work with

Clients typically have $1M or more in exposed assets that have not yet been structured correctly.

The legal consultation is a two-way evaluation. If the Bridge Trust® is not appropriate for your situation, I will tell you directly and point you toward the correct structure.

Why Washington structures fail

Washington has no Domestic Asset Protection Trust statute, an LLC statute that authorizes foreclosure, and a bankruptcy court that has already looked through an out-of-state trust.

Washington creditors do ask for that remedy, and the statute hands it to them. "A charging order constitutes a lien on the judgment debtor’s transferable interest. The court may order a foreclosure upon the transferable interest subject to the charging order at any time." RCW 25.15.256(2).

Division One has said the same thing in plainer words — "The charging order constitutes a lien on the judgment debtor’s transferable interest, which may be foreclosed." 3320 MLK, LLC v. Helsell Fetterman, LLP, No. 81406-1-I (Wash. Ct. App. Div. One, July 19, 2021) (unpublished; cited as nonbinding under GR 14.1).

Timberland Bank v. Mesaros, No. 50207-1-II (Wash. Ct. App. Div. Two, May 15, 2018) (unpublished; cited as nonbinding under GR 14.1) shows what that looks like from the debtor’s chair. The bank got a charging order against Mesaros’s interest in his single-member LLC. The court foreclosed the interest. The sheriff sold it to a stranger. And because all of his transferable interest had been sold, Mesaros was dissociated from his own company under RCW 25.15.131(1)(b), which ended his "right to participate as a member in the management and conduct of the company’s activities" under RCW 25.15.131(3)(a). He was also held in contempt twice — $1,000 a day — for not turning over the LLC’s records.

He did not lose the distributions. He lost the company.

Washington does not need a federal court to unwind a structure. It has its own fraudulent transfer act, chapter 19.40 RCW, and the most instructive case on this page came out of Seattle. In Rigby v. Mastro (In re Mastro), 465 B.R. 576 (Bankr. W.D. Wash. 2011), a developer who was already insolvent by August 2008 held his house, his jewelry, and his cars in separate series of a Delaware series LLC, owned by a trust administered through a purported Belizean trust company. The court applied RCW 19.40.041(a)(1)-(2) and found the transfers avoidable. His wife was held liable for property moved into the trust through those entities, and her separate-property claim under their premarital agreement failed for lack of proof.

The series did not matter. The Belize paperwork did not matter. The timing did.

The out-of-state trust problem is not limited to Washington. In Toni 1 Trust v. Wacker, 413 P.3d 1199 (Alaska 2018), the Alaska Supreme Court held that Alaska’s own statute cannot divest other states’ courts of jurisdiction over fraudulent transfer claims. And in United States v. Huckaby, No. 2:23-cv-00587-DAD-JDP (E.D. Cal. Mar. 2, 2026), a Nevada choice-of-law clause governed how the trust was read, but not whether a creditor could reach the real property inside it. Courts do not analyze paperwork. They analyze control.

The full analysis is in Asset Protection in Washington State: What Happens When a Creditor Actually Tests Your Structure.

What works in Washington

Protection in Washington comes from layered separation built before any claim exists. No single tool does it.

Charging-order exclusivity governs how a judgment creditor collects. Courts have carved exceptions — receivership, reverse veil piercing, alter ego, fraudulent transfer — and it does not survive bankruptcy. The domestic layers raise the cost of collection. See LLCs and the Asset Management Limited Partnership.

The Bridge Trust®

A structure that stays inside Washington’s enforcement system — regardless of how it is labeled — remains reachable. The Bridge Trust® answers with jurisdiction rather than a sister-state statute.

It is classified as domestic for U.S. tax purposes under the court and control tests of Treas. Reg. §301.7701-7, with a licensed offshore trustee engaged from day one as Special Successor Trustee. In that posture there is no separate foreign reporting burden and no change to how your CPA files.

If a genuine creditor threat arises, the Trust Protector — an independent attorney exercising professional judgment — may declare an Event of Duress, and control shifts to the Special Successor Trustee under the pre-existing terms of the instrument. That shift is not automatic. Nothing fires on the filing of a complaint. It is deliberate, documented, and supervised by counsel and the Trust Protector. It is not a transfer of assets; what changes is who controls the trust, and where.

That is where collectibility changes. The Cook Islands framework does not recognize U.S. judgments, requires the creditor to prove fraudulent intent beyond a reasonable doubt, imposes short limitation periods, and shifts costs against a losing claimant. Nevis, the other successor jurisdiction, also requires a creditor to post a statutory bond before suit.

No structure makes anyone judgment-proof, and no lawyer can promise a courtroom outcome. What a properly built and properly timed structure changes is what a creditor can reach and what it costs to try. The case law shows both sides:

• FTC v. Affordable Media, LLC, 179 F.3d 1228 (9th Cir. 1999). The Cook Islands trustee refused the repatriation order and the money never came back. When the FTC pursued the trust in the Cook Islands, the High Court rejected its attempt on every point on August 10, 1999 and awarded costs against it. The Andersons were still jailed for civil contempt, and the reason is the lesson: they served as co-trustees and as protectors of their own trust, holding the power to certify that no event of duress existed. Separation of roles is the point — not that offshore jurisdiction is magic, or that it is worthless.
• SEC v. Solow, 682 F. Supp. 2d 1312 (S.D. Fla. 2010). Contempt upheld based entirely on post-judgment transfers and continued personal use of trust assets. The case turned on bad timing and bad conduct — not on any defect in the offshore structure itself.
• Riechers v. Riechers, 178 Misc. 2d 170 (Sup. Ct. Westchester Cty. 1998), aff’d 267 A.D.2d 445. The court lacked jurisdiction over the Cook Islands trust corpus, but it had jurisdiction over the husband, and the wife was awarded $2,000,000 plus a $3,052,853.20 judgment. Asset protection does not defeat family obligations.

This is pre-litigation planning. If a lawsuit is already filed, the window has likely closed.

The Washington estate tax underneath it

Washington’s estate tax exclusion is $3 million per individual for deaths on or after July 1, 2026, with graduated rates reaching 20% on the portion above $9 million. The federal exemption is $15 million, so a Washington family can owe significant state estate tax while owing no federal estate tax at all.

Washington’s exemption is not portable between spouses. Each spouse’s exemption must be used at each death or it is lost. And while Washington has no general income tax, its capital gains excise tax — 7% on long-term gains above an annual threshold, reaching 9.9% on gains above $1 million — lands precisely at the liquidity event.

The Bridge Trust® carries dynasty provisions in the same instrument, and the Dynasty Bridge Trust® plan addresses the generational tax problem and the creditor problem together. See the Washington estate tax analysis.

Track record

This is platform history, not a prediction of future results.

What clients and colleagues say

Frequently asked questions