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Nicholas LaSpina is a senior counsel in the Tax Department and a member of the employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Group.

The Tax Court’s May 3, 2023, decision in ES NPA Holding, LLC v. Commissioner (T.C. Memo 2023‑55), upholding a taxpayer’s position to characterize a partnership interest as a profits interest under the “safe harbor” of IRS Revenue Procedure 93-27 (as clarified by IRS Revenue Procedure 2001-43), provides helpful guidance to issuers of profits interests, including private equity funds and other investment partnerships and their portfolio companies.

In this episode of The Proskauer Benefits Brief, David Teigman, partner in the Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation Group, Simon Sharpe, partner and member of ourproskauer benefits brief podcast Private Equity and Mergers & Acquisitions groups and Nick LaSpina, senior counsel in the Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation Group discuss rep and warranty insurance (RWI) in the mergers and acquisitions context. They also focus on certain aspects of this insurance product as it relates to executive compensation and employee benefits matters. For the last 10 years, we have only seen the use of this insurance product proliferate, so be sure to tune in as these issues will continue to be highly relevant in any transactional practice.


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Proxy advisory firms Institutional Shareholder Services (“ISS”) and Glass Lewis (“GL”) each published their annual policy updates for 2023, which updates made certain changes relating to executive compensation.[1]  As a general matter, the changes are incremental to the existing policies and do not significantly change the rubric by which ISS and GL review compensation

proskauer benefits brief podcast

In this episode of The Proskauer Benefits Brief, partner David Teigman, senior counsel Nick LaSpina, and special international labor & employment counsel Nicola Bartholomew, discuss differences between asset sales in the US and the UK, with respect to transfers of employees.  In short, there are significant differences that are not necessarily intuitive to US practitioners.  In the US, parties will have commercial freedom to make offers of employment and negotiate terms, whereas in the UK employees will transfer automatically as a result of TUPE and a number of significant protections and obligations apply that will need to be factored into the deal. So be sure to tune into this informative discussion about employment and benefits issues in asset sales in the US and the UK.


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proskauer benefits brief podcast

In this episode of The Proskauer Benefits Brief, Proskauer partner David Teigman, senior counsel Nick LaSpina, and special guest Michelle Garrett, a principal at the compensation consulting firm Semler Brossy, discuss employee retention. It seems like there is an article almost every day talking about the “great resignation.”  In a nutshell, there have been far more job transitions recently than there have been in the past. Tune in as we discuss what employers can do to help retain employees in this working environment.


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On December 21, 2021, the Department of Labor (the “DOL”) published a Supplemental Statement (the “Supplemental Statement”) to its June 3, 2020 Information Letter (the “2020 Letter”) addressing fiduciary considerations for including private equity within an investment option under an ERISA-covered defined contribution plan (e.g., a 401(k)

On October 14, 2021, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (the “DOL”) published in the Federal Register a new proposed regulation (the “Proposed Rules”)[1] on fiduciary responsibility in selecting ERISA plan investments and exercising shareholder rights (proxy voting). The Proposed Rules reflect an effort to “warm” what the current DOL perceives