Our story begins in the late nineties, when David Marshall, a partner at Atlas, was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs. As a newly-public company, Goldman asked David to design a market-based nonqualified deferred compensation plan for its senior executives. As part of the project, he was asked to develop a solution for managing P&L-related risks.

 

The optimal solution would provide favorable accounting and tax treatment without tying up capital. David partnered with Cliff Eisler (then an external consultant and service provider) to design a strategy using dynamically-reweighted highly-correlated total return swaps and worked with Goldman management and Cleary Gottlieb to confirm favorable tax treatment for the program. They received two patents in support for this new strategy, and later established Atlas’s first subsidiary, Atlas Benefit Finance, to administer the solution to the broader marketplace. The solution is now utilized by many Fortune 500 companies today.

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Our second subsidiary, JurisPrudent Deferral Solutions, was created to address risks in deferred compensation programs for law firms, referred to as attorney fee deferral programs. JurisPrudent continues to provide the most advanced solution for successful law firms today.