About

A boutique, on purpose.

La Presa is Spanish for "the dam." A dam holds back what should be held back and lets through what should flow. That is a fair description of good tax structuring.

The firm

Why small.

Specialist experience, direct senior attention, and a team built around the matter. When you call, you reach the person who will do the work, and that person has sat in your chair: inside a $300 billion asset manager, inside a hedge fund, and inside the national tax offices of two of the Big Four. We work well alongside the large firms and their partners; many of our matters arrive through them.

Our clients are investment managers (private equity, credit, real estate, and quantitative funds), family offices, and private clients with complex holdings, along with the lawyers who represent them. We work alongside counsel at firms such as Akin Gump and Milbank, and we are often the second opinion. We are comfortable being the first.

What sets the practice apart is the arithmetic. Most tax advice stops at the rule; where the answer turns on economics, ours continues to the number, in a model your CFO can test.

Founder

Carlos A. Schmidt

Managing Member · MBT, MBA, CPA

Carlos founded La Presa Partners in 2022 after two decades structuring funds and transactions across every major asset class. From 2013 to 2022 he was Partner and Global Head of Tax at Ares Management, recruited to build the tax function from the ground up. He built it from three people to more than forty as the firm grew from $50 billion to over $300 billion of assets, structured the 2014 IPO and its Up-C and tax receivable agreement, and later led Ares's conversion from a publicly traded partnership to a C corporation, the first in the alternatives industry to do so.

Before Ares he was a Partner at Ernst & Young, where he helped lead about sixty tax professionals and served as the national partnership resource for the investment management group with a heavy credit focus, and a Partner in Deloitte's National Tax Office, where he built the firm's syndicated bank loan guidelines for offshore funds and CLOs and its framework for anticipatory allocations in European waterfalls. Earlier he was Tax Director at Highbridge Capital Management, structuring the funds that became the HPS direct lending and mezzanine platform, and an equity research associate at Goldman Sachs covering the lodging sector.

He has taught at Wharton's Business Tax & Strategy class, Georgetown University Law Center, and the Practising Law Institute, and co-wrote the PLI treatise chapter on anticipatory allocations that changed how many alternative asset managers allocate partnership taxable income.

Education: Master of Business Taxation, University of Southern California (Graduate Commencement Speaker)
MBA, Finance, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (Goldman Sachs MBA Fellowship)
BS, Accounting, University of Southern California
A proud USC Trojan.
Credentials: Certified Public Accountant; Master of Business Taxation; MBA
Publications: Co-author, chapter on anticipatory allocations in partnership waterfalls, PLI Partnership Tax Treatise, Practising Law Institute (2018 Supplement, Vol. 16, ch. T-14)
Speaking: Wharton Business Tax & Strategy · Georgetown University Law Center · Practising Law Institute (Pocket MBA)
Prior firms: Ares Management · Ernst & Young · Deloitte Tax · Highbridge Capital Management · Goldman Sachs
Contact: carlos@lapresallc.com · (917) 558-6393 · Los Angeles, California

Selected experience

Representative matters.

At La Presa

Manager transactions & capital solutions

Advised Canyon Partners on the strategic minority investment by Dai-ichi Life and its $1.3 billion commitment to Canyon-managed funds. Tax adviser to Trimontium on its $325 million capital solution for Authentic Restaurant Brands (September 2026).

At La Presa

Fund structuring

Leveraged blocker structure for a real estate fund of more than $1 billion; tax-efficient structures for two middle-market lending platforms with a combined $3.5 billion under management.

At La Presa

Renewable energy

Advised Blue Planet Funding on a $900 million solar project in Texas.

At La Presa

Family office & private client

A complex estate tax return under IRS audit; a family limited partnership and estate plan; a 70% sale of a well-known entertainer's business to a private equity fund; film-royalty investment structures for DWS, CEG, and a family office.

At Ares

Public markets

The 2014 IPO, Up-C and TRA; the conversion to a C corporation; ARCC's $4 billion acquisition of American Capital, including a novel revenue ruling; a private letter ruling that produced a $275 million current deduction.

At Ares

Acquisitions & funds

Acquisitions of Black Creek ($11 billion AUM), Landmark ($18.7 billion), SSG ($6.2 billion), and AMP Capital's infrastructure debt business ($8 billion); treaty-based U.S. lending funds from $900 million to $7 billion; the Pathfinder ABS fund and its evergreen companion (over $5 billion); more than $3 billion of Special Opportunities Fund investments including Ferrellgas, Aston Martin, and Savers Value Village.

Confidentiality

We use public information and authorized descriptions of our work.

Client names appear with permission; illustrative examples are identified as such