James A.Curcio

James A. Curcio “Jim” is an Attorney with Vicevich Law.  Jim represents and advises individuals and businesses in tax, estate planning, organizational, transactional, litigation, employment, real property, criminal, and intellectual property matters.

A native of Buffalo, New York and current resident of Butte, Montana, Jim has five university degrees.  He received his Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center.  At Georgetown Law, Jim was an Executive Articles Editor for the Georgetown University Law Journal on Fighting Poverty.  He specialized in tax law, securities law, corporate transactions, and intellectual property.

James also holds two Masters of Law degrees, one in Tax Law from the University of California at Irvine and the other one in Dispute Resolution from Pepperdine University School of Law Straus Institute.  In the first Master of Law program, James specialized in individual taxation, corporate taxation, partnership taxation, international taxation, and state and local taxation.  In the second Master of Law program James specialized in mediation, cross-cultural dispute resolution, practicing with disabled clients and opposing parties, counseling, negotiation, litigation, and arbitration.

Before attending law school, Jim received two undergraduate degrees, a BS with cum laude honors and a BA with cum laude honors and with distinction in all subjects, from Cornell University College of Engineering and Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences.  The BS was in Engineering Computer Science with a emphases on artificial intelligence, natural language processing, databases, operating systems, and software engineering. The BA was in History and Linguistics.  In History, I emphasized modern United States history and Japanese history as well as the history of computer technology.  In Linguistics, I specialized in computational linguistics, speech recognition, recognizing and representing syntax and semantics from multiple languages in a computer, phonetics, and the structure of the Korean language.

Jim has licenses to practice law in Montana, California, Colorado as well as before the United States Patent and Trademark Office.  Jim has been practicing law since 2007.  Jim has served as a Patent Examiner, Analyst, and Attorney with respect to United States patent applications and Patent Cooperation Treaty patent applications for 13 years in the technical fields of software control systems. cryptography, software development systems, business methods, speech recognition software, and Boeing aircraft technology.  Jim interned with the Honorable Alexander Williams. III, a former settlement judge in the Los Angeles Superior Court.  He has also interned with the tax director of Arbonne Corporation. a domestic subsidiary of the French Corporation, the Rocher Groupe.  The Rocher Groupe is famous for Yves Rocher women's cosmetics product lines.  At Arbonne, Jim solved the challenge of using up a backlog of $2 million of foreign tax credits against U.S. source income and planned the generation and use of additional future foreign tax credits against U.S. source income.  Jim also obtained an exemption for Arbonne on reporting the U.S. income of its parent company, the Rocher Groupe, to the IRS. 

Jim has litigated several successful employment and tax cases, including against the United States and California governments.  He has also structured many business and estate planning transactions to minimize income tax, sales and use tax, estate tax, capital gains tax, dividend tax, and gift tax exposure.  In Jim’s estate planning practice, Jim has helped both business clients and individual clients to plan for their legacies and longevity.

Jim aspires to (1) treat all legal clients as intelligent human beings, (2) defer to clients’ knowledge of the facts and the overall objectives behind their matters, (3) competently and diligently control the legal means to obtain the client’s overall objectives (4) keeping clients up-to-date on their matters (5) to not only “fish” for his clients but to teach clients how to “fish” in the future to reduce the need for legal fees, (6) either acknowledge or respond in detail to clients’ phone or email inquiries within 24 business hours, (7) to bill with integrity for only time and communications that are necessary for the client’s legal matter and other legal inquiries.  With respect to aspiration (7), I do not bill for the portion of phone calls or email writing dedicated solely to “shooting the breeze” or “rapport-building”.

Outside of work, Jim sings with a tenor voice, swims laps, takes photos, hikes, and enjoys the outdoors as hobbies.  His favorite musical is Les Misérables.