Winona Thorpe

Winona Thorpe leads the firm's Trusts & Estates practice. She advises high-net-worth families on multi-generational wealth transfer, charitable structuring, and fiduciary litigation — a practice mix that spans the full arc from plan design to courtroom defense when a plan is later contested. Her clients include founders of Connecticut-based operating businesses, multi-generational family offices, and several private charitable foundations whose governing instruments she drafted. A meaningful portion of her practice involves the interplay between the Tax group (on estate, gift, and GST planning) and the Corporate group (on pre-sale trust structures for founders approaching a liquidity event). Thorpe graduated from Williams College in 1998 and earned her J.D. from Yale Law School in 2002. She joined the firm in 2004 after two years at a New York practice, where she worked on sophisticated estate-planning structures for Connecticut-commuting clients. She made partner in 2012 and took over as practice group head in 2019. Under her leadership the practice has grown from four attorneys to seven and has added a dedicated fiduciary-litigation workstream. She is a Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC) and has served on the Connecticut Bar Association's Estates and Probate Section Executive Committee since 2014. Within the firm, she supervises three associates and a senior paralegal, and personally handles the group's most sensitive fiduciary-litigation engagements. She has been listed in *Best Lawyers in America* for Trusts and Estates Law since 2018 and in *Chambers HNW* since 2021. Her approach to estate planning is sometimes described by colleagues as measured — a word she has said she prefers to "conservative" because it captures the actual discipline of the work: not avoiding complexity for its own sake, but sequencing complexity carefully enough that each structure can be defended ten years later by a different practitioner reading a different draft. ## Publications - "Decanting in Connecticut: Practical Limits of Trust Modernization Under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 45a-499p," *Connecticut Bar Journal*, Vol. 95 (2021). - Co-author, Chapter 7 (Charitable Gift Annuities and Split-Interest Trusts), *Connecticut Estate Planning, Will Drafting and Estate Administration Forms* (LexisNexis, 2023 revision). - "Fiduciary Litigation in Probate Court: A Drafting-Side Retrospective," *ACTEC Law Journal*, Fall 2019. - "Drafting for the Blended Family: Connecticut Considerations," *Connecticut Lawyer* magazine, May 2022. ## Board Service Thorpe serves on the board of the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving's Professional Advisors Council and is a trustee of the Mark Twain House & Museum, where she chairs the governance committee. She is a past president of the Junior League of Hartford and serves on the advisory board of the Connecticut Community Foundation's Planned Giving Council. ## Beyond the Firm Thorpe is a serious amateur cellist and performs with a Hartford-area chamber ensemble several times each year. She earned her A.B. at Williams on a music scholarship and has said she nearly went to conservatory instead of law school. She and her husband, a physician at Hartford Hospital, live in West Hartford with their two children. She is admitted in Connecticut and New York.