Jones Day's Tax Practice
Jones Day's Tax Practice brings comprehensive, integrated advice to our clients across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Asia-Pacific. Joseph Goldman and Colleen Laduzinski discuss how clients' tax questions and concerns have changed in recent years, and how Jones Day is helping them respond to tax policy changes in jurisdictions around the world.
Read the full transcript below:
Joseph Goldman:
We have one of the largest tax practices among global law firms, lawyers in 21 offices in 11 countries, the major business centers, and many of our clients are large multinationals with operations throughout the world. We have a large global footprint because our clients do.
Colleen Laduzinski:
We have transactional tax lawyers, as well as tax controversy litigation lawyers. We are quintessentially the cross-office, cross-practice practice. We work necessarily with almost every office and practice on deals, transactions, restructurings. Some of the things that we do include working with our bankruptcy and restructuring teams representing a company that goes into distress, into bankruptcy, undergoes a sale, undergoes a refinancing, undergoes a global reorganization, and we work through all of those issues together with our corporate teams, M&A, finance, restructuring lawyers, employee-benefits lawyers, labor lawyers, you name it. Every practice is involved in this type of engagement, and tax, in many cases, is structuring the deal.
Joseph Goldman:
The global tax environment and the tax profession has undergone tremendous change in the last few years. There's tax reform in every major country. The United States, for example, in 2017, cut the rates and imposed a minimum global tax, and foreign countries followed with a tax competition. There's tax controversies that are developing throughout the world.
Colleen Laduzinski:
Our international tax lawyers are working together to help companies devise strategies for understanding and working within the new structure, which involves a completely revolutionized way of taxing the profits of foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations. It's not just U.S. taxation that's changed. There's global tax reform, and we're working with our lawyers across the world in Amsterdam, in Australia, in the UK, in Madrid, in Milan, in Latin America, in Asia to address the fact that the global taxation system has completely changed.
Joseph Goldman:
Nearly every country in the world is changing their tax rules, and the rules aren't consistent with each other. It used to be that we were hired for the purpose of lowering a company's tax rate. Now, the trend is to avoiding double taxation.
Colleen Laduzinski:
What we do at Jones Day to make sure that we're staying abreast of all of the changes, which are coming fast and furious, is we're all working as a team in a deliberate and smart way to get our arms around what is a massive amount of regulatory and code change in the U.S. and globally.
Joseph Goldman:
Never before in as long as I've been practicing has tax been this high profile in the media and in the board room. Our clients look to us to wade through the complexity and deliver practical, correct, and clear answers in plain language that they can understand. What's challenging and fun about what we do is that no one size fits all. Each business is unique, and different decisions can have a dramatically different impact on a client.
