Biography: Corporate Tax

Mr Paton is a member of Davis Polk's tax department, advising corporate and financial clients in US domestic and international taxation. Since 1988, he has been resident in our European offices, and has overseen our tax practice in Europe and Asia since 1993.

He has worked on the US tax aspects of private and public offerings of securities in the United States and abroad; the structuring of international financial products, the structuring of international joint ventures and business combinations, cross-border acquisitions and divestitures; structuring of investment funds to invest internationally utilising a variety of entity forms, including US and non-US partnerships, non-US corporate entities treated as partnerships for US federal income tax purposes and corporations ; and structuring for investments made by such funds.

Mr Paton is listed as a leading lawyer in Law Business Research's The International Who's Who of Business Lawyers.

He is a member of the New York State Bar Association and the US Tax Court.

Mr Paton gained his BCom from the University of Aukland in 1982. He was a Fulbright Scholar and won a William Georgetti Scholarship. He went on to achieve his LLB with honours from the University of Aukland in 1982, and obtained his LLM from Comell Law School in 1984.

Mr Paton started work in the Paris office from 1988-1989 and then went onto the London office in 1989 where he has worked till the present day. He worked in the position of associate from 1984 to 1993, counsel from 1993 to 1997 and then became partner, a position that he still holds.