Doug Mitchell, Principal, Pinion, LLC
As a tax and estate attorney to successful business owners and their families for more than 20 years, Doug Mitchell designs sophisticated tax strategies involving complex charitable and estate-planning structures. To have the greatest positive impact, he begins working with people during their income-producing years, then increasingly through their retirement and as they transfer their assets to the next generation.
Doug is often called upon to help people as they face difficult situations such as the sudden illness or loss of a loved one, usually someone heavily involved in the family business. With his deep business knowledge and unique empathy level, he proves a caring and invaluable confidant as he guides surviving family members through maintaining the continuity of their operations with minimal disruptions. This is essential whether they plan to ultimately keep or liquidate their business, either of which he skillfully attends to.
Some examples of how Doug helps business owners and their families include:
- Mitigating the short-term and long-term tax effects for a shareholder in an oil and gas business when the sale of an asset resulted in a $40 million increase in income, enabling the transfer of millions, tax free, to his heirs.
- Planning for the smooth transition of a $15 million family farm from one generation to the next by setting up ownership structures that provide income and voting rights according to family members’ level of involvement in the farming operation.
- Building a strategy for first-generation owners of a Kansas agricultural equipment manufacturer that preserved wealth of $32 million through estate-planning vehicles, as well as using a testamentary charitable plan to potentially eliminate estate tax liability for the owners’ heirs.
After earning his law degree, Doug pursued a master’s degree in taxation and practiced law in Denver before joining the firm in 2013. Years of practical experience solving families’ wealth management and succession challenges equip Doug to thoughtfully analyze alternative solutions from multiple angles. Particularly important are his considerations of the economic impact on each individual and the effect that certain structures might have on family harmony.
