History
Harold Harkins started his solo estate planning law practice in downtown Tampa in 1989 after serving as a staff assistant in the corporate office at TECO Energy for six years. While he enjoyed being part of the TECO family, he missed helping individual clients with their estate planning. After graduating from the University of Tennessee College of Law in 1974, Harold had started doing estate planning at a small law firm and a community bank in the mountains of western Virginia. Except for the first year of practice in downtown Tampa, across Franklin Street from TECO, the office has been on Busch Blvd, just south of original Carrollwood.
In March of 2018, Harold, then operating his practice as Harkins & Associates, hired Anthony DiPierro, who had 13 years of experience as an expert in tax law and was just beginning to learn the intricacies of estate planning and settlement. Harold has been a top-notch mentor for Anthony, and in August of 2019 Harold and Anthony formed Harkins DiPierro LLP as partnership between the two of them.
Throughout this history, we have limited the practice to estate planning and settlement, and we don’t do anything else. Understanding that people do estate planning for their peace of mind, we spend as much time explaining how things work as we do gathering the information needed to prepare clients’ estate planning documents. We’ll be happy to help you find an appropriate attorney for something we don’t do, but we “stick to our knitting.”
Attorneys
ATTORNEY
Anthony DiPierro Jr.
Prior to becoming an attorney in 2016, Anthony had over 10 years of experience in tax preparation and IRS representation, including as an Enrolled Agent (licensed by the IRS to represent individuals and businesses in audits and other tax disputes), a designation which he maintains to this day.
Anthony graduated from Rutgers University in 1998 with a bachelor of science degree in Computer Science. He graduated from the Tampa campus of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in 2015, is a member of the Florida Bar and the Bar of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida, and is admitted to practice before the United States Tax Court.
RETIRED ATTORNEY
Harold L. Harkins, Jr., Retired
Harold grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee, an Eastman Kodak town which was amazingly cosmopolitan for that part of East Tennessee. He attended the city schools where he learned to speak English without an East Tennessee accent and graduated from high school in 1966. After attending Virginia Tech for a year, he transferred to and graduated from Furman University, Greenville, SC, in 1970 with a BA in history and English. After deliberating about getting a degree in Library Science or going to law school, he fortuitously chose law school, graduating from the College of Law, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (with a minor in hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park where he also worked as a Volunteer in Parks) with a Doctor of Jurisprudence in 1975.
This was followed by his back to the land period in Tazewell, Virginia, where he spent a year or so with the law firm of Campbell, Newland & White doing estate planning and administration and title work. Most of his time there, however, was with the Bank of Tazewell County, a local home-town bank where he set up their trust department, and also made mortgage, commercial and consumer loans. After five winters of several weeks of bitter sub-zero weather, he decided to move to a warmer climate and came to Tampa to work with TECO Energy, Inc in 1982.
At TECO Harold was a staff assistant in the corporate office with responsibility for shareholder services, corporate minutes and records, closing new stock and bond issues, and oversight of investments in the pension and 401(k) plans. While he enjoyed his work, he missed working directly with people and after five years, left to start his estate planning practice. He is admitted to the State Bar Associations of Florida (1983) and Virginia (1976) and is a member of the Florida Bar Real Property, Probate & Trust Law Section.
He has also donated his time and expertise over the years to a variety of nonprofit organizations. In the 1980s he was the newsletter editor and outings chair person for the Tampa Bay Group of the Sierra Club. He also served from 1988 until 2015 as a member of the board of directors and Treasurer for the local blood banking entities: first with the Tampa entity, SW Florida Blood Bank, second, with the three merged entities in Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties as Florida Blood Services, and finally with the current entity, One Blood.
Support Staff
Administrative Assistant
William Hession
William began working at Harkins & Associates in 2015. His primary role in the office is to assist clients in transferring their assets to their trust. He also works closely with Harold and Anthony in preparing estate planning documents. William was previously a teacher in Hillsborough County for several years and has attended University of Delaware and Florida State University.