One minute with Katie Leah, partner in Goodwin’s tax practice.
What’s keeping you busy at work?
I am a transactional tax specialist and I advise across the full deal life cycle. I am happiest working on busy deals across the private equity and real estate sectors (don’t tell anyone, but I even like negotiating tax drafting at 2am). I also place enormous value on pro bono work and always aim to have a couple of active pro bono matters on my desk. Not only is it the right thing to spend time on, it often throws up interesting technical questions.
I am part of a generation of female partners who have been able to look up and see brilliant senior women to whom we can aspire. Now I’m in a position to impact the culture around me, I make sure I spend time passing on the mentorship and support that I was so lucky to benefit from. If anyone reading this is feeling defeated by the juggle of work and life, please reach out. We all have responsibility for making our industry inclusive and diverse.
If you could make one change to tax, what would it be?
In a non-work context, we should make childcare tax deductible. We have some of the most expensive childcare in Europe and too often we lose talented parents because the maths around long hours and childcare just don’t add up. Cap it, means test it, but working families need more support in the UK.
In a work context, UK stamp duty is an easy one to identify. It is always greeted with amusement on conference calls with international advisers when I have to explain the (usually niche and often illogical) impact on a non-tax driven structure. Whilst the covid induced electronic submission is a step forward (no more getting on trains to Birmingham), areas of UK stamp duty clearly remain anachronistic.
More broadly, we have increasingly seen industry-changing tax legislation introduced which is opaque, difficult to implement or just doesn’t work (I’m thinking, for example, of certain provisions in the anti-hybrids legislation and non-resident CGT rules). In other jurisdictions, tax advisers move between the public and private sectors far more easily and regularly than in the UK. If more talented advisers moved between the two sectors here, and shared their valuable insights from each world, the implementation of our new tax rules would be hugely improved.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your career?
The culture of a firm is immeasurably important and so much more than a buzz word in the graduate recruitment literature. Find somewhere you can thrive as yourself. Then, once you have found your place (and, of course, after the small task of getting to grips with the thousands of pages of tax legislation), focus on your communication skills. The most impressive tax lawyer can take a fiendishly complicated area of tax and explain the commercial implications of it to a client in a way that makes it sound simple. Clients value that above everything else – their job is taking the relevant commercial decisions, not having to decode their adviser’s emails.
What issues have been clients been raising recently?
The ‘will he, won’t he’ question of a potential CGT raise has been looming over transactions recently. We’re all relieved it didn’t materialise in the last Budget, but there is still lingering concern over future rate rises, which will impact, among other things, how we think about our management incentives.
For US clients utilising LLCs, the amendment to Chapter 7 on hybrid payee mismatches (which aims to treat certain non-UK transparent entities as partnerships when determining the extent of a mismatch) is welcome, but the impact of anti-hybrid legislation across Europe is having significant impact on structures.
You might not know this about me but...
I love running, cycling, and playing the piano but I have one special talent: an innate ability to burn every single meal I have ever attempted to cook. My excuse is that it is because I am distracted thinking about my latest structure paper...
One minute with Katie Leah, partner in Goodwin’s tax practice.
What’s keeping you busy at work?
I am a transactional tax specialist and I advise across the full deal life cycle. I am happiest working on busy deals across the private equity and real estate sectors (don’t tell anyone, but I even like negotiating tax drafting at 2am). I also place enormous value on pro bono work and always aim to have a couple of active pro bono matters on my desk. Not only is it the right thing to spend time on, it often throws up interesting technical questions.
I am part of a generation of female partners who have been able to look up and see brilliant senior women to whom we can aspire. Now I’m in a position to impact the culture around me, I make sure I spend time passing on the mentorship and support that I was so lucky to benefit from. If anyone reading this is feeling defeated by the juggle of work and life, please reach out. We all have responsibility for making our industry inclusive and diverse.
If you could make one change to tax, what would it be?
In a non-work context, we should make childcare tax deductible. We have some of the most expensive childcare in Europe and too often we lose talented parents because the maths around long hours and childcare just don’t add up. Cap it, means test it, but working families need more support in the UK.
In a work context, UK stamp duty is an easy one to identify. It is always greeted with amusement on conference calls with international advisers when I have to explain the (usually niche and often illogical) impact on a non-tax driven structure. Whilst the covid induced electronic submission is a step forward (no more getting on trains to Birmingham), areas of UK stamp duty clearly remain anachronistic.
More broadly, we have increasingly seen industry-changing tax legislation introduced which is opaque, difficult to implement or just doesn’t work (I’m thinking, for example, of certain provisions in the anti-hybrids legislation and non-resident CGT rules). In other jurisdictions, tax advisers move between the public and private sectors far more easily and regularly than in the UK. If more talented advisers moved between the two sectors here, and shared their valuable insights from each world, the implementation of our new tax rules would be hugely improved.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your career?
The culture of a firm is immeasurably important and so much more than a buzz word in the graduate recruitment literature. Find somewhere you can thrive as yourself. Then, once you have found your place (and, of course, after the small task of getting to grips with the thousands of pages of tax legislation), focus on your communication skills. The most impressive tax lawyer can take a fiendishly complicated area of tax and explain the commercial implications of it to a client in a way that makes it sound simple. Clients value that above everything else – their job is taking the relevant commercial decisions, not having to decode their adviser’s emails.
What issues have been clients been raising recently?
The ‘will he, won’t he’ question of a potential CGT raise has been looming over transactions recently. We’re all relieved it didn’t materialise in the last Budget, but there is still lingering concern over future rate rises, which will impact, among other things, how we think about our management incentives.
For US clients utilising LLCs, the amendment to Chapter 7 on hybrid payee mismatches (which aims to treat certain non-UK transparent entities as partnerships when determining the extent of a mismatch) is welcome, but the impact of anti-hybrid legislation across Europe is having significant impact on structures.
You might not know this about me but...
I love running, cycling, and playing the piano but I have one special talent: an innate ability to burn every single meal I have ever attempted to cook. My excuse is that it is because I am distracted thinking about my latest structure paper...
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