Leslie Samuels is a Senior Counsel based in the New York office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. His practice has focused on international and domestic taxation, including mergers and acquisitions, new financial products, foreign direct investment in the United States, and tax policy. He lectures and is widely published on the various aspects of taxation law.
He joined the firm in 1968 and became a partner in 1975 and Senior Counsel in 2012. From 1993 to 1996, he served as Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy of the U.S. Treasury Department, and from 1994 to 1996 also served as vice chairman of the Committee of Fiscal Affairs in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, as well as a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Samuels rejoined the firm in 1996 as a partner.
He received a J.D. degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. His undergraduate degree is from the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. He was also a Fulbright scholar at the London School of Economics.
Samuels is a member of the Board of Advisors of The Hamilton Project and the Tax Policy Center. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a director of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
