By Patricia Cohen, New York Times 

Steven Oshins, a Las Vegas lawyer who specializes in estate planning, has never met the wealthy software entrepreneur Dan Kloiber, but he is nonetheless intensely interested in Kloiber’s contentious divorce.

“I have had a Google news alert on that for a couple years,” Oshins said as he discussed the case from his office in a squat pink complex about a 20-minute drive from the Las Vegas Strip. What animates Oshins is not the juicy marital feud, but the legal arcana governing a trust in Delaware where the Kloiber family parked assets worth hundreds of million of dollars, sheltered from estate taxes.

Oshins, with a gleeful grin spreading across his face, relished the thought of the no-longer-beloved wife of Dan Kloiber busting through the trust and exposing a potential chink in the formidable trust protection armor promised by Delaware — which just happens to fiercely compete with Nevada for the lucrative business of shielding assets owned by the superrich.

Although most out-of-town visitors are drawn to the city’s roulette wheels and slot machines, Oshins and a battalion of tax lawyers, accountants, advisers, trust administrators and bankers cater to an elite clientele that insists on a much more reliable way to build a fortune.

With their backing, Nevada has stoked an aggressive rivalry among a smattering of states to baby-sit the wealth of the nation’s top 1 percent, pressing public officials to pass laws, streamline regulations, lower fees and replace DMV-level service with concierge treatment.

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