Partner Perspective: An Interview on Tax Trends in Insurance

As a leader in JL’s tax department, what keeps you motivated to continue pursuing your career goals?

One of my biggest motivators in working with our tax clients is knowing that I can be a business partner that helps our clients through difficult times. People are often fearful of taxes and we offer them support through a process that can be intimidating and cause uncertainty. On my team we practice a lot of self-reflection in order to improve the client experience. Knowing that there is always an opportunity to create better outcomes for our clients through the services we offer is always a strong motivator.

What interests you about the industries you serve and the future of those marketplaces?

Captive Insurance Observations:

• In the captive insurance space, we’ve seen an explosion of more and more companies willing to take on risk and explore new ways to alleviate potential risks.
• There continues to be a growing need to minimize risk as much as possible, and our tax team has the ability to identify and mitigate risks for captives before they have recognized the risk themselves.

Commercial Insurance Observations:

• Mergers and acquisitions is a huge trend in the commercial insurance space. Insurance companies don’t have as much time to wait and prepare as they have done in the past and so they are growing through acquisition.
• We’ve seen a lot of clients expanding their service offerings to policyholders, adding cybersecurity insurance or wealth management services.

Overall we’ve seen more and more clients want to understand the value of their company and the value of their potential expansion or acquisition of other business entities. This allows Johnson Lambert the ability to complete due diligence work with our clients to help them identify that value.

What is the JL differential?

We have the ability to take a unique approach to serving our clients because every team member is an expert in the insurance industry.

• We recognize that we have no business without our clients so we emphasize building personal relationships and delivering timely, high quality service as keys to our success.
• Having a relationship with our clients and a mutual respect and trust with each client that allows us to really understand their business and provide customized tax solutions.
• Our clients are not numbers in revenue, we know that if we get to know the person first, the business will follow.

What’s the highest compliment a client can give you? 

Having a client recommend our services to someone else they know in the industry. And that’s because we enjoy the role of making our clients look smart. 

• We help them do their job to the best of their ability, and educate them when they need to report back to their boards and other stakeholders.
• We make time for our clients. Sometimes it’s before their 8 AM meeting, and it’s our job to provide high quality service and answers to our clients’ questions whenever and however they come up.

What’s one aspect of your job you wish you could do more of?

We love helping clients solve their problems:

• We are able to identify client needs and risks that they might not even know they have. And when we are able to address something before it becomes an issue, we’ve done the job of both solving and preventing problems for our clients.