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Taxes
/ Estates / Trusts
David E. Perry
Flippin Densmore
Morse & Jessee
by Holly M. Rodriguez
David E. Perry |
At
the beginning of his law career, David E. Perry had
no dreams of trial pyrotechnics, no fantasies of thundering
at a jury. In fact, he figured he’d never set foot
in a courtroom. “I never wanted to be a litigator,”
he says. “When I went to law school it was with
the idea of becoming a business lawyer.”
And
over the course of his 15-year practice, Perry got his
wish. He has toiled away from the glare of the courtroom
in more private confines working on his specialty of
taxes, estate planning and benefits at Roanoke-based
Flippin Densmore Morse & Jessee. It’s a good
thing he doesn’t have to face judges. In his line
of work, the only time he’d have to go before a
judge would be if he did something wrong. “So,
I guess I’ve been doing my job right,” he
says.
Estate
planning and taxation law is a good way to combine law
and business. Perry says he isn’t sure where he
picked up the love of law, though he learned the importance
of a strong work ethic from his father. A marketing
graduate in the University of Virginia McIntire School
of Commerce Class of 1982, the Martinsville native knew
he had an interest in business. And when he entered
law school two years later at Washington & Lee University,
he knew business law would be a perfect marriage.
Perry
advises businesses on every aspect of tax law —
from deciding whether to organize the business as a
corporation, to carefully structuring business transactions
for minimum tax liability. But the majority of his time
is spent working with clients’ employee benefit
issues, including retirement and pension plans. “This
is the largest part of my business and the most geographically
diverse — we have clients as far away as Texas,”
he says. His clients, including companies like Advance
Auto Parts and Comprehensive Computer Solutions Inc.,
range in size from a few hundred to 25,000 employees.
Colleague and former co-worker Alexander Boone, general
counsel for his family’s real estate brokerage
and development firm, Boone & Co., says Perry has
a knack for looking beyond a legal issue to see the
long-range impact on a business as a whole. “David
brings up things and points out ways your decisions
can affect your business that you did not even think
of,” he says.
Understanding
the full impact of those decisions requires an incredible
amount of research and work. The demands of managing
client relationships, synonymous with Perry’s role
as a partner, combined with his workload as an attorney,
require him to work six days a week, usually 11 hours
a day. “My typical schedule is to get to work around
8:30 in the morning and get home at 7:30 at night, have
dinner with my family, tuck my children into bed, and
then I go back to working.”
No
matter how arduous the task, Boone says Perry is willing
to go that extra mile to make sure his clients understand.
“He personally cares about his clients and becomes
an integral part of their team,” Boone says. “Their
problems become his problems, and when you need him
he is there.”
Perry’s
dedication to building his firm’s practice leaves
little spare time. A history buff, he tries to catch
history speakers at Virginia Tech and Washington &
Lee. But most of his spare time is spent with his wife
of 10 years, who is a litigator, and their two children.
“We vacation at least two times per year,”
he says. “My in-laws have a beach home in Emerald
Isle, N.C., so we go there.”
The
best part of his work day, he says, is developing relationships
with clients. That helps him understand complex and
constantly changing employee benefit regulations. “Keeping
abreast of regulations is time-consuming, but the most
challenging part of my job is taking a very complex
topic and being able to make it understandable to the
client,” he says.
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to Virginia Business - December 2002
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