Focus Areas
- Extensive transactional experience representing privately held businesses in connection with mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, capital raises, recapitalizations and restructurings.
- Handled multiple brand acquisitions from The Procter & Gamble Company.
- Represented client through complex $100+ million business combination transaction.
- Conducts/assists with annual meetings of privately held companies.
- Represented borrowers in work-out scenarios.
- Drafted numerous shareholder agreements, buy-sell agreements and succession plans for privately held businesses.
- Designed comprehensive estate and succession plans ranging from the very modest to the large and sophisticated.
- Drafted numerous irrevocable trusts, generation-skipping trusts, intentionally defective irrevocable trusts, asset protection trusts, and the like.
- Resolved IRS gift and estate tax audits involving valuations of closely held entities and assets.
- Extensive experience in advanced estate planning (preparation of irrevocable trusts, revocable trusts, gift trusts, insurance trusts, qualified personal residence trusts, charitable remainder trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts, etc.).
- Extensive experience decanting trusts, pursuing probate court reformations of trusts, and drafting private settlement agreements for trusts.
- Represents affluent families with complex personal and financial circumstances, including highly appreciated, non-liquid assets.
- Selected for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America© 2017 to 2022 for Trusts and Estates
- Listed in Legal 500 in Mergers and Acquisitions, 2014
Community Activities
- Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; Board of Directors, 2018-present; Audit and Ethics Committee Chairman, 2019-present; Governance Committee
- Cincinnati Zoo Foundation, Inc.; Board of Trustees, 2015- present
- Vanderbilt University; CoRPs Program (Alumni prospective student interviewer for the School of Engineering), 2007-present
- University Club of Cincinnati; Board of Governors, 2004-2010; Club President, 2009; Vice-President, House Committee Chairman and President-elect, 2008; Vice-President and Finance Committee Chairman, 2007; Treasurer, 2006; Secretary, 2004-2005; Finance Committee, 2004-2010; Broadway Improvement Committee, 2011-2012
- Vanderbilt Alumni Association, Cincinnati Chapter, 1996-present
Professional Associations
- Association for Corporate Growth, Cincinnati chapter
- Cincinnati Bar Association
- Cincinnati Estate Planning Council
- Kentucky Bar Association
- Northern Kentucky Bar Association
- Ohio State Bar Association
Education
- Salmon P. Chase College of Law, J.D.,
1994, cum laude, NKU Law Review
- Vanderbilt University School of Engineering,
1991, Engineering and Economics (double major), cum laude
Bar Admissions
- Ohio
- Kentucky
Court Admissions
- U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio
- Business Law Update – Summer 2020,
Thompson Hine Newsletter
, July 9, 2020