San Antonio is Texas’s second-largest city and one of the fastest-growing major metropolitan areas in the United States, combining its status as a premier military city — home to Joint Base San Antonio, the largest military installation complex in the country — with a diverse civilian economy spanning healthcare, tourism, financial services, manufacturing, energy, and a rapidly expanding technology sector. The San Antonio metropolitan area’s extraordinary demographic and economic diversity creates a wide spectrum of estate planning needs — from military families navigating the unique estate planning considerations that arise from service-connected benefits, survivor benefit plans, and the geographic mobility of military life, to established San Antonio business families with multi-generational ranching and real estate wealth, to the growing professional and executive community that San Antonio’s corporate expansion has attracted.
Texas provides a particularly favorable environment for estate planning residents. Texas imposes no state income tax and no state estate or inheritance tax — meaning that Texas residents’ estate planning focuses exclusively on federal estate and gift tax considerations, with the substantial federal estate tax exemption providing meaningful protection for all but the wealthiest Texas families. Texas’s specific estate planning legal framework — including the Texas Estates Code governing wills, trusts, and probate administration, the Texas Durable Power of Attorney Act, and the Texas Medical Power of Attorney statute — creates the statutory architecture within which San Antonio estate planning attorneys serve their clients. Texas’s community property system — which generally treats assets acquired during marriage as equally owned by both spouses — creates important planning opportunities and considerations that distinguish Texas estate planning from planning in common law property states.
1. Bernard Reyes — Reyes Browne Reilley
Bernard Reyes is one of San Antonio’s most highly regarded estate planning and probate attorneys, with a practice at Reyes Browne Reilley that has served South Texas families in comprehensive estate planning, trust administration, business succession planning, and probate matters for many years. Reyes has been recognized by Super Lawyers Texas in estate planning and probate law for multiple consecutive years and has been included in Best Lawyers in America — reflecting sustained peer recognition from Texas’s legal community for the consistent quality and sophistication of his estate planning counsel.
Reyes’s practice encompasses the full range of estate planning services — wills, revocable living trusts, irrevocable trusts, durable powers of attorney, medical powers of attorney, and directive to physicians — combined with sophisticated wealth transfer strategies including irrevocable life insurance trusts, qualified personal residence trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts, and family limited partnerships that serve San Antonio’s high-net-worth families and business owners. His particular expertise in Texas community property planning — leveraging the unique planning opportunities created by Texas’s community property system, including the use of community property agreements and qualified spousal trusts that maximize the stepped-up basis available to surviving spouses — reflects specialized Texas-specific knowledge that attorneys practicing in common law property states simply cannot provide.
His deep familiarity with San Antonio’s military community creates particularly valuable planning expertise for Joint Base San Antonio’s substantial population of active duty and retired military personnel. Military estate planning requires specific knowledge of Survivor Benefit Plan elections, Servicemembers Group Life Insurance designations, Thrift Savings Plan beneficiary designations, and the interaction between these military-specific benefits and broader estate planning documents — knowledge that Reyes’s years of serving San Antonio’s military families have developed into genuine specialized expertise.
2. Judith Harness — Harness Law Firm
Judith Harness is a highly regarded San Antonio estate planning and elder law attorney whose practice focuses on comprehensive estate planning, Medicaid planning for long-term care, special needs planning, and trust administration for Bexar County and South Texas families. Harness has been recognized by Super Lawyers Texas in estate planning and probate and has developed a strong reputation for combining comprehensive estate planning expertise with specialized elder law knowledge — providing San Antonio families with integrated planning that addresses both wealth transfer objectives and the practical realities of aging and long-term care cost exposure.
Harness’s practice encompasses wills, revocable and irrevocable trusts, powers of attorney, directive to physicians, special needs trusts for beneficiaries with disabilities, Texas Medicaid planning for long-term care, and trust administration — reflecting the comprehensive range of estate planning services that San Antonio families need across different life stages and family circumstances. Her particular expertise in Texas Medicaid planning — navigating the Texas Health and Human Services Commission’s complex eligibility rules for long-term care Medicaid under the Texas STAR+PLUS and related programs — reflects specialized knowledge that is of critical practical importance for San Antonio families facing nursing facility or assisted living costs that can reach several thousand dollars per month.
Her practice’s particular attentiveness to the needs of San Antonio’s large Hispanic community — including familiarity with the cultural values around family wealth, the importance of providing for multiple generations of family members, and the specific estate planning tools that best serve multigenerational family financial planning in San Antonio’s cultural context — distinguishes her practice from attorneys without specific experience serving the South Texas cultural and demographic context.
3. David Sergi — Sergi and Associates
David Sergi is a prominent San Antonio estate planning and business law attorney at Sergi and Associates whose practice focuses on integrated estate planning and business succession planning for San Antonio’s entrepreneur and business owner community. Sergi has been recognized by Super Lawyers Texas in estate planning and business law and has developed a reputation in the San Antonio business community for sophisticated planning counsel that addresses the critical intersection between business ownership and personal estate planning that every business-owning family must navigate.
His practice’s particular strength in business succession planning — helping San Antonio family businesses, ranching operations, real estate investment companies, and closely held corporations structure the transfer of ownership to the next generation or to third-party buyers in ways that accomplish family objectives while minimizing federal estate and gift tax exposure — reflects specialized expertise at the precise intersection of estate and business law where the most consequential San Antonio planning work occurs. The concentration of multi-generational family business wealth in San Antonio — particularly in ranching, real estate, and construction — creates significant demand for the specific expertise that Sergi’s integrated business and estate planning practice provides.
His mastery of family limited partnerships and family limited liability companies as estate planning tools — vehicles that allow business-owning families to transfer interests to the next generation at discounted values while maintaining operational control during the senior generation’s lifetime — reflects technical expertise in the most commonly used sophisticated estate and business succession planning techniques for Texas business families.
4. Margaret Holbrook — Holbrook and Holbrook PC
Margaret Holbrook is a San Antonio estate planning attorney whose practice focuses on comprehensive estate planning for individuals and families across the full economic spectrum — providing the full range of estate planning services from foundational wills and powers of attorney to sophisticated trust-based planning that reflects genuine understanding of each client’s specific family circumstances, financial situation, and planning objectives.
Holbrook’s practice encompasses wills, revocable living trusts, irrevocable life insurance trusts, powers of attorney, directive to physicians, and beneficiary designation reviews — providing the comprehensive estate planning infrastructure that every San Antonio family needs to protect their assets and ensure that their wishes are honored. Her particular commitment to making estate planning accessible and genuinely understandable for clients approaching these documents for the first time reflects a client education philosophy that prioritizes client comprehension over legal efficiency — ensuring that clients leave her office with a genuine understanding of what their documents do, how they work, and what their families will need to do after they are gone.
Her particular attention to blended family planning — addressing the complex estate planning dynamics that arise when clients have children from prior marriages, stepchildren, and the need to provide for both a current spouse and children from previous relationships — reflects specialized knowledge of one of the most common and challenging estate planning scenarios in San Antonio’s demographically diverse community.
5. Christopher Tinsley — Tinsley Law Firm
Christopher Tinsley is a San Antonio estate planning attorney whose practice focuses on representing San Antonio military families, veterans, and civilian clients in comprehensive estate planning — with particular expertise in the specific estate planning considerations that arise from military service, including Survivor Benefit Plan elections, VA benefits planning, and the interaction between military survivor benefits and broader estate planning documents.
His practice’s particular focus on military estate planning — reflecting San Antonio’s status as the nation’s largest military community — provides Joint Base San Antonio’s active duty service members, military retirees, and their families with estate planning counsel that addresses the specific benefits, entitlements, and planning considerations that characterize military family estate planning. The complexity of military survivor benefits, the geographic mobility of military families that requires portable estate planning documents, and the specific risks of military service that make prompt and comprehensive estate planning particularly urgent together create a specialized planning context that Tinsley’s practice is specifically equipped to address.
His accessibility to military families at every rank and economic level — recognizing that estate planning is as important for a young service member with modest assets as for a senior officer with substantial accumulated wealth — reflects a genuine commitment to serving the full spectrum of San Antonio’s military community.
