Profile: Pinney L Allen

Corporate Tax

Biography: Corporate Tax

Pinney L Allen is co-chair of Alston & Bird's tax practice. A member of the federal income tax group, Ms Allen concentrates her practice on the structuring and effecting of complex business transactions, as well as partnership and corporate tax planning and litigation.

She has worked in a variety of settings to use joint ventures, partnerships and LLCs to achieve business objectives in 'non-traditional' acquisition contexts. She recently led a team of over 100 lawyers in the formation and - later break-up - of an industry-leading multibillion-dollar 'factory' transaction involving the joint sharing of mobile telephone infrastructure and complex service relationships for Cingular Wireless. She structured the largest acquisition of cellular towers in history, representing GTE (now Verizon) in its joint venture with Crown Castle, involving over US$1 billion in mobile telephone tower sites. She also worked in representing a major real estate investor in creating a US$500 million 'mixing bowl' structure for ownership of mature real estate assets.

Additionally, Ms Allen maintains an active corporate tax practice, having secured a one-of-a-kind ruling (in less than three months) from the Internal Revenue Service for Arcadis - a Dutch public company making its first US acquisition - on the characterisation of its stock as voting stock for purposes of the reorganisation provisions. She has been involved in numerous other transactions in recent years - leading the firm, one year, in issuing over 100 opinions in taxable and tax-free transactions.

She received her JD and AB from Harvard University.