Skip to content
Estate and Succession Planning

Dean Mead’s Estate and Succession Planning Department is one of the largest and most respected groups of estate planning attorneys in Florida. We are frequently…

Read More...
Tax

Dean Mead’s Tax Department handles tax planning issues for businesses and individuals.  The attorneys in our department have extensive experience in a full range of…

Read More...

Practice Area

Employee Stock Ownership Plans

Maximize Tax Advantage, Maintain Effective Management Control, and Structure Compensation to Enhance Performance

An Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOPs) is an ingenuitive and important business, tax, financial, and succession planning tool; they are also a means by which employees can acquire ownership interest through the acquisition of company stock. An ESOP can enable company founders/owners to develop succession plans that meet their estate planning and financial goals, while keeping their businesses strong and viable and leaving a legacy for employees to prosper from. Whether a transition involves a partial ESOP sale or a complete transfer of ownership to an ESOP, it requires the experienced business and regulatory guidance that Dean Mead offers to all parties at the ESOP table: owners, ESOP trustees, lenders, investors (such as private equity funds), and employees.

At Dean Mean, our decades of experience help Florida-based businesses and nationwide organizations achieve their ESOP objectives by guiding them through the transition to employee ownership and helping ensure long-term success. Our firm’s ESOP practice works with local counsel around the country. We address federal law issues for ESOP creation, structuring corporate transactions, preparing IRS filings for tax qualification and plan termination, resolving fiduciary matters, and advising on the various tax opportunities and incentives associated with ESOP transactions. 

We stay up-to-date on the latest ESOP developments through our active roles in organizations like The ESOP Association and the National Center for Employee Ownership.

“ESOPs are crucial transition plans for owners, allowing them to create an incentivized and productive workforce,” said Jay Van Heyde, shareholder and lead attorney for the firm’s ESOP Group. “The benefits of employee ownership and its empowering effect have been seen repeatedly in longstanding, successful ESOPs.”

Representative Experience

The below representative examples of ESOP transactions that Dean Mead has structured and closed illustrate sophisticated transactions we have helped clients with:

  • Transferring 30% of a general contractor’s issued and outstanding common stock from the selling shareholders to a newly created ESOP.
  • Redeeming 100% of the issued and outstanding common stock of a specialty contractor and simultaneously selling 100% of its newly issued common stock to an ESOP on a seller-financed basis.
  • Converting a limited liability company into a corporation, followed by a partial redemption and partial sale to a newly created ESOP of 100% of the issued and outstanding common stock through seller and bank financing.
  • Redeeming 100% of the issued and outstanding common stock of a manufacturing company and simultaneously selling 100% of its newly issued common stock to an ESOP on a seller-financed basis.
  • Selling 51% of a specialty contractor’s issued and outstanding common stock to an ESOP.
  • Representing the ESOP of a publicly-traded NASDAQ company, including the ESOP’s underwritten sale of a portion of its employer securities.
  • Representing the ESOP trustee in the sale of the company stock owned by the ESOP to an unrelated third party.
  • Representing the ESOP trustee in a second stage transaction in which the ESOP moves from owning a minority interest in the company to a majority or a 100% ownership position.
Related Practice Areas

Attorneys

Labor and Employment

Providing Critical Legal Advice for all Levels of Workforce Management The complexity of today’s labor and employment laws create a tangled web that must be deftly navigated to avoid legal issues concerning, but not limited to, harassment, discrimination, wage and hour compliance, proper classification of employees, leave issues, restrictive covenants, protection of confidential information and…

Let's Work Together

We would love to talk with you about how we may assist you. However, please know that contacting us through this page does not establish an attorney-client relationship; no attorney-client relationship will be established until you and we agree to representation. You should not send us any confidential information through contact from this page or until requested by the attorney, and we will not treat any information you choose to provide as confidential.