Over the last 20 years, financial accounting and tax considerations have led U.S. forest product companies to divest tens of millions of acres of timberland holdings to institutional investors such as pension funds and real estate investment trusts. Powell Goldstein's lawyers have had a prominent role in this ownership transformation, representing timberland investment management organizations, institutional investors, financial institutions and high net worth individuals in dozens of transactions involving cumulatively millions of acres of timberland. We now have one of the largest and deepest timber practice groups of any law firm in the world.

As transactions have increased in scale and complexity, we have adapted our practice group to provide the interdisciplinary approach required to efficiently manage the array of legal issues that these transactions present. The timber practice group members' collective areas of expertise include:

• Real Estate, including title and access issues, environmental and endangered species issues, timber supply and cutting agreements, carbon credit development and conservation easements

• Tax, including complex installment sale transactions, planning for in-bound U.S. investments by foreign investors (including foreign governments), devising tax structures for investments outside the U.S., state transfer tax planning, and management of unrelated business taxable income issues for tax-exempt investors

• Capital Markets, comprising lender and borrower representation in financings of timberland acquisitions (including traditional mortgage financings, securitizations, and specialized installment note financings), equity offerings by timberland investment fund sponsors, and representation of financial institutions providing credit enhancement and securitization services for installment sale transactions

• ERISA, including prohibited transaction and fiduciary duty issues for pension fund investors and their fiduciaries; and

• Corporate, including HSR and Blue Sky compliance and REIT formation and operational matters

Institutional investors increasingly compose their timberland portfolio with a view to global diversification, and our timber practice group consequently has extensive experience representing timberland investors in transactions outside the United States (with emphasis on Latin America), and we have a well-established network of relationships to facilitate transactions in the regions where we work.