Benetta Y. Park

Bessemer Trust

Benetta Y. Park is a Managing Director and Senior Fiduciary Counsel at Bessemer Trust, based in the West Palm Beach, Florida office.  In her role as Senior Fiduciary Counsel, Benetta assists clients with the development of comprehensive, multi-generational wealth transfer and tax planning strategies and guides the firm on fiduciary issues.  Prior to Bessemer Trust, she was the President of a multi-generational, single-family office in the Midwest.  Throughout her career, she has been a national resource in many areas, including family office structuring, family governance, trust design, fiduciary issues, international estate planning, planning for business owners, including Qualified Small Business Stock, sustainable investing, Qualified Opportunity Zones, and planning with cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens.  She also previously was a partner in the Private Client Department of the law firm of McDermott Will & Emery in Chicago.

Benetta is a Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC) and was invited to join the College as part of its inaugural class of Fiduciary Counsel Fellows.  She serves on ACTEC’s Board of Regents and as a member of the Board of Directors of the ACTEC Foundation.  She is a member of the Business Planning, Charitable Planning and Exempt Organizations, and Program Committees, as well as the FATF Task Force. In addition, she currently is serving as Chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Real Property, Trust and Estate Law for the 2024-2025 bar year.  She also is a member of Florida’s East Coast and Palm Beach County Estate Planning Councils and Palm Beach Tax Institute.  She has served in many leadership roles of several other international, national and local professional organizations.

Benetta also frequently speaks and writes nationally on family office topics, trust and estate planning, and fiduciary issues.  Benetta is a former Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University’s law school LL.M. tax program and taught “International Estate Planning,” and she has served as faculty for the national estate planning conference, the Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning, the Notre Dame Tax & Estate Planning Institute, and for various courses at the Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education (IICLE).  She has been quoted in news periodicals, including CNBC, Morningstar and Tax Analyst’s Tax Notes.

Benetta earned her J.D. from Loyola University Chicago School of Law and her Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.