Graham Kenney

Partner
Direct dial: 512-256-7718
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Graham Kenney

Graham is a Partner in the Austin office of the Firm. Graham focuses his practice on estate and tax planning for wealthy individual clients, family offices, fiduciaries, and closely-held family businesses.

Graham has extensive experience helping clients value and transfer difficult to value assets, including: closely-held business interests, family limited partnerships, commercial, undeveloped, and residential real estate, farms and ranches, minerals, interests in private equity funds, other private investment vehicles, and a wide variety of personal property, including fine art.

Graham also has notable experience helping clients with transitioning management of family businesses to a new generation, complex estate and trust administration issues, trust decantings and the judicial modification of trusts, transfers of shares eligible for QSBS exemptions, and the formation and operation of family investment entities, including family limited partnerships.

Graham has helped clients resolve controversies with the Internal Revenue Service involving a wide variety of issues, including gift and estate taxes, income taxes, employment taxes, nonprofit exemption applications, and the unrelated business income tax. Graham has wide-ranging experience helping clients resolve controversies with the IRS related to the valuation of difficult to value assets, particularly those involving family limited partnerships and other closely-held businesses and fine art.

EDUCATION

  • The University of Texas School of Law, J.D., with honors, 2003
  • University of Oklahoma, B.A. magna cum laude, 2000

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY

  • Ytterberg Deery Knull LLP, 2012-Present
  • Vinson & Elkins LLP, 2007-2012
  • Baker Botts LLP, 2003-2007

ADMISSIONS

  • Admitted to practice: Texas, 2003; United States Tax Court, 2004; U.S. Court of Federal Claims; U.S. Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit, 2005; U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, 2006

OF NOTE

  • Listed in Best Lawyers, 2020-Present; “Texas Rising Star” in Tax or Estate Planning, Texas Monthly magazine (2006 and 2012-2017)
  • Presenter, “When the Value of Art is Gray: Shaking Your Client’s Etch-a-Sketch” ABA 2017 RPTE Spring Symposium
  • Presenter, “Elkins v. Commissioner: What Does the Case Mean for Fair Market Value of Fractional Interests?” ABA 2015 Spring Symposium
  • Co-Author, “Gifts of Interest in Art after Estate of Elkins,” Sotheby’s Trust & Estates Bulletin, Winter/Spring 2015