Jeffrey W Jones

Jeff has been practicing trust and estate law in Ellsworth since 1985. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Rutgers-Camden School of Law, and is admitted to the bars of the state and federal courts of Maine and New Jersey (inactive) and the U.S. Supreme Court. Jeff is regularly invited to testify before the Maine Legislature on proposed legislation concerning trusts, estate planning, and probate administration. Since its creation in 2009, Jeff has been one of the ten lawyers and judges serving on the Maine Probate and Trust Law Advisory Commission (PATLAC), having been appointed and reappointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Jeff is the author of the chapter on “Marital Deduction Planning” in A Practical Guide to Estate Planning in Maine, published in 2012 (revised 2017). Jeff was elected a Fellow of the American College of Trust & Estate Counsel (ACTEC) in 1990, and is currently a member of the Practice Committee, the Technology Committee, and the Artificial Intelligence Task Force. He was named Dean of the ACTEC New England Fellows Institute in 2019. His most recent national project has been as an Observer on the committee that drafted the Commission’s Uniform Recognition of Digital Wills Act (2019). Jeff has been included in the directory “The Best Lawyers in America” since 1995, and he was voted to the first “New England Superlawyers” in 2007 and every year thereafter. Martindale-Hubbell has awarded him an “Av” rating, described as the “highest possible rating in both legal ability and ethical standards.” Jeff has made many educational presentations about trust and estate law over the years, from local seminars for non-lawyers to national meetings of lawyers and trust bankers.