Sarah M. Johnson

Sarah Johnson is an Associate with Venable, LLP where she concentrates on estate planning and administration, business planning and charitable giving. She is experienced in planning for the distribution of small estates as well as estates worth over $100 million, and has drafted and negotiated several premarital agreements. Ms. Johnson's recent experience includes: overseeing the execution of a complex estate plan involving a family limited partnership, gifts of discounted partnership interests to generation-skipping trusts, a private foundation, will, and intra-family loans; obtaining favorable IRS rulings on (i) conversion of a foreign grantor trust to a U.S. non-grantor trust and (ii) late allocations of generation-skipping transfer tax exemptions to trusts; and drafting trusts and forming corporate entities for various lifetime giving techniques. Ms. Johnson was a senior financial analyst in the Valuation Services Group of Arthur Andersen LLP in Atlanta prior to attaining her law degree, and in that capacity gained considerable knowledge in valuing assets and using discounts in estate planning. Ms. Johnson also clerked for American Cancer Society's Office of Corporation Counsel, where she became familiar with the tax laws applicable to charitable organizations.

Ms. Johnson is a member of the bar in both Georgia and the District of Columbia. She is the Vice-Chair of the Estate Planning Committee of the D.C. Bar Taxation Section, and a member of the Section of Taxation and the Section of Real Property, Probate and Trust Law of the American Bar Association. Ms. Johnson also serves as the Coordinator of the Whitman Walker Estate Planning Clinic for Venable.

In 2002, Ms. Johnson earned her J.D. (magna cum laude) from the University of Georgia School of Law where she was a member of the Order of the Coif, the Outstanding Notes Editor of the Georgia Law Review, and received the John C. O'Byrne Excellence in Taxation Award. She earned her B.S. from Wake Forest University in 1997 where she received the Thomas K. Hearn Excellence in Leadership Award.

From 2003-2005, Ms. Johnson conducted monthly presentations on Current Developments in Estate, Gift and Generation-Skipping Transfer Taxes to the Estate Planning Committee of the DC Bar. She has also published the following articles:
Life Insurance Trusts and Insurable Interest: Did Chawla Go Too Far?, Washington , D.C. Estate Planning Council Newsletter, Issue No. 41 (Spring 2005).
"Testamentary Trusts as the Beneficiary of an Individual's Retirement Plan in Georgia ," State Bar of Georgia Taxation Section Newsletter (Spring 2003).
"Facility Hostility? Sex Discrimination and Women's Restrooms in the Workplace," 36 Ga. L. Rev. 599 (2002).