Leslie Nielson

Biography

Leslie Nielson is a Managing Director with Alvarez & Marsal Taxand LLC in New York, leading the firm’s global HR tax practice. Ms. Nielson has more than 17 years of M&A tax experience across various facets of human capital, including employee benefits and remuneration plans such as: pensions, pre and post-retirement healthcare, insured benefits and equity incentives, talent selection, HR delivery models, HR technology and systems and communications. On any particular transaction, Ms. Nielson’s pre-acquisition advisory support may include providing adjustments to purchase price for notable HR liabilities, negotiation of key transaction terms, quantifying long term cash flow requirements, commentary on transition services agreements and/or early development of post-deal work plan (integration, separation, synergy achievement). Besides her extensive experience providing traditional human capital due diligence services, Ms. Nielson’s experience extends after the transaction to include retention planning, organization design, program alignment, talent selection, and workforce planning. She has worked with both corporate and private equity clients on new acquisitions, and the implementation of sustainable cash savings and revenue enhancement solutions for existing entities. Ms. Nielson's background includes managing M&A projects with both a domestic and global footprint, for middle and large market corporate buyers and mega private equity firms. She has worked on several multinational carve-out transactions involving a financial sponsor purchase of assets from a previous corporate sponsor and has run the Project Management Office for various HR work streams in order to stand-up an entity’s HR department operations and programs. Prior to A&M, she was a member of the human resources transaction services team during her 10 year tenure at PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York. There, her client base was primarily comprised of mega and middle-market private equity firms, including one New York-based private equity firm on a dedicated basis. Subsequently, she spent three years as a partner in Aon’s M&A Solutions group, based in London, serving as the EMEA practice leader for Aon’s joint HR and Insurance M&A practice. Her client base covered a broad range of industries, including chemicals, manufacturing, oil and gas, hospitality, financial services and pharmaceuticals. Ms. Nielson earned a bachelor’s degree in actuarial science from the University of Iowa.

Research Interest

Leslie Nielson has 16+ years of dedicated HR M&A experience and he advised on hundreds of transactions. He has material expertise with multiemployer pension plans and he managed HR workstream for several multinational carve-out transactions