Our Story

Every firm has an origin. Ours begins with a conviction, tested across five decades and two generations, that the families who build significant wealth deserve legal counsel of extraordinary depth, maintained across the full arc of their financial lives.

The Founder

Robert W. Boland, Jr. did not come to the law through a conventional path. Before he ever entered a courtroom, he served as a Green Beret in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. That experience taught him something that shaped everything that followed: discipline, precision under pressure, and the understanding that the quality of preparation determines the outcome long before the decisive moment arrives.

After his military service, Rob began his career in the tax world, working as an accountant with Grant Thornton LLP before going inside the Internal Revenue Service itself. He came out of that experience with something most tax attorneys never acquire: an understanding of the federal government not as an abstraction, but as a machinery he had seen operate from within. When he entered private practice, licensed in 1974, he used it. For years he cut his teeth fighting the IRS and the full weight of federal tax authority on behalf of clients who needed counsel that understood the beast from the inside. He became exceptionally good at it.

He earned his Juris Doctor and then his LL.M. in Taxation from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he would later return as an adjunct professor in the school’s Tax LL.M. program, teaching the next generation of tax attorneys the discipline he had spent his career mastering. In Kansas City, he co-founded Boland, McQuain, Block, DeHardt & Rosenbloom, where his practice drew some of the most powerful personalities and enterprises in the region. Rob became the attorney that serious people called first.

One of those clients, having worked alongside Rob closely enough to understand what they had in front of them, extended an offer that few attorneys ever receive: come inside the enterprise and lead it. Rob accepted. What followed was a rise that has no parallel in the estate planning profession, and few parallels anywhere in the legal world. From general counsel, he ascended to President, then Chief Executive Officer, and ultimately to Chairman of the Board of a national bank holding company whose operations spanned banking, insurance, and investments from Missouri to California. He did not inherit a finished institution and maintain it. He ran it. He grew it. He took it to heights it had not previously reached, making the kinds of decisions that define a company’s trajectory and shape the financial lives of everyone connected to it. By the time Rob returned full-time to the practice of law, he had accumulated something that cannot be taught in a classroom or replicated through decades of ordinary legal practice. He knew, from direct personal experience at the chairman level, how capital actually moves, how institutional wealth is governed, how boards think, how financial enterprises are built and scaled, and how the full ecosystem of advisors, executives, and fiduciaries surrounding a high-net-worth family operates when serious decisions are on the table. No other estate planning attorney in this region has sat where he has sat.

When Rob founded Boland Law Group, he brought all of it. The discipline of a decorated special forces combat veteran. The precision of an LL.M. trained tax attorney with five decades of expertise and a personal history of fighting the IRS on behalf of clients who needed someone who understood that institution from within. The perspective of a man who had governed a major financial enterprise at the chairman level, grown it, and emerged with a firsthand understanding of how wealth at the highest levels is actually managed and protected. And the conviction, undiminished across fifty years of practice, that the attorney-client relationship in estate planning should be as enduring as the plans themselves. He built a firm for a specific kind of client, in a specific place, with a philosophy that has not wavered since the day he opened the doors.

Built for This

Grant M. Boland, J.D., LL.M. did not find this field. He was raised in it. The son of one of the most formidably credentialed tax and estate planning attorneys in the country, Grant grew up inside the intellectual world of sophisticated wealth planning. The vocabulary, the frameworks, the standards of rigor, and the caliber of clients that most attorneys spend entire careers working toward were present in his formation from the beginning. When Grant joined the firm in 2006 to clerk for his father, he did not arrive searching for direction. He arrived as someone who had been preparing for this work his entire life, and who now had the opportunity to learn it at the feet of the attorney who had built not one but two of the most respected legal practices in the discipline.

When Grant chose to pursue his LL.M., the decision reflected what had always been true about him. Already trained under Steven A. Bloom, J.D., M.B.A., LL.M., one of the country’s preeminent tax and trust attorneys and former head of Greenberg Traurig, LLP’s Trust & Estates practice group in the Phoenix office, Grant selected the Estate Planning and Elder Law program at Western New England University School of Law, a technically demanding post-doctoral credential available at the precise intersection of tax and estate planning. There was no dabbling. No years spent in unrelated practice areas before finding a direction. Grant chose this field with the same intentionality with which he had already been trained to approach it. He came into the law knowing exactly what he was going to do, earned the credential that would let him do it at the highest level, and has not deviated from that course since.

What makes Grant genuinely uncommon is not any single credential or recognition. It is the combination of what he brought in, what he was trained in, and what he has continued to build. His expertise spans business and corporate law, tax planning and controversy, trust design, and sophisticated estate planning. Not as adjacent specialties he has collected. As a unified system he operates simultaneously. The attorney who can sit with a client and evaluate their entity structure, their transfer tax position, their fiduciary architecture, their succession plan, and their generational transfer strategy as a single integrated whole, in one conversation, without handing pieces of it to other specialists, is not a generalist. He is the rarest possible kind of specialist: one whose breadth is itself the expertise. Estate planning at the level Grant operates requires seeing eight dimensions of a problem at once. Most attorneys in this field see two or three. He sees all of them.

Grant’s engagement with the institutions and families he serves extends well beyond the drafting table. He has served on multiple boards of directors overseeing nine-figure institutional balance sheets. He is not an observer of how consequential organizations are governed. He is a participant. He advises some of the most influential companies, families, and known quantities in Arizona on the legal and structural architecture underlying their wealth, their governance, and the legacies they are building. The families and enterprises that retain Grant are not looking for someone to prepare documents. They are looking for the attorney who understands their full situation at the level they operate and can design a structure equal to it. That is the work Grant does.

He has represented clients in the United States Tax Court, with particular experience in TEFRA family limited partnership matters. He has been recognized by Best Lawyers in America for Tax Law and Trusts and Estates, named to the Super Lawyers Rising Stars list, and honored as one of Arizona’s Top 50 Pro Bono Attorneys for his work with the Wills for Heroes program and the Disabled American Veterans estate planning clinic. Across every dimension that defines excellence in this discipline, Grant’s profile is without a close parallel in Arizona’s estate planning bar. That is not a superlative. It is simply a fact.

The Parallel

We counsel families on multi-generational stewardship because we practice it ourselves. We are a family that works together, that shares a professional mission across generations, and that has built an institution designed to outlast any individual. Rob’s five decades of expertise and his singular perspective as a practitioner, an IRS insider, and a corporate chairman remain the foundation of everything the firm does. Grant’s practice carries that foundation into the present, applying it at full force to the most sophisticated planning challenges facing the firm’s clients today.

We understand the dynamics of intergenerational collaboration, the tensions between continuity and evolution, and the importance of shared values as the foundation of shared enterprise. We understand these things because we live them.

When we tell a client that their planning should be built to endure across generations, it is not an abstract concept to us. It is the standard on which our own firm was founded and the measure by which we judge everything we do.