Pamela S. Kaufmann

Intro

Pam is a seasoned attorney with more than 35 years of experience helping clients navigate legal issues related to senior care, housing, and tax-exempt organizations. She advises life plan communities, assisted living facilities, skilled nursing facilities, hospices, home care agencies, PACE providers, affordable housing operators, and other providers at all phases: development (corporate structuring, financing, licensing, and tax exemption), operations (contracting, regulatory compliance, risk management, and nonprofit compliance), and delicensing or down-licensing. 

As economics dictate or opportunities arise, Pam guides clients through mergers, affiliations, sales, joint ventures, expansions, repositionings, and dissolutions, including all attendant filings. She has intimate knowledge of the Attorney General approval process and interacts with the AG's office routinely. Pam also has a keen eye for corporate governance issues and routinely advises clients' boards of directors as they navigate these changes.

Pam's deep insight into clients’ operations and her extensive tax-exempt knowledge makes her a natural choice for borrower’s counsel when clients incur tax-exempt debt. She routinely works with the Cal-Mortgage program at the Department of Health Care Access and Information.

Pam has also collaborated with our bankruptcy team to guide a senior care client through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Pam remains on the cutting edge of legal reforms and developments in senior care and housing. She regularly speaks before the American Bar Association, American Health Lawyers Association, California Assisted Living Association, LeadingAge, and several LeadingAge state affiliates on issues including cannabis, psychedelics, aid in dying, violence, and mental health in senior care. She has contributed articles on these and other subjects (such as fair housing) to a wide variety of senior care journals. She has also written many scholarly articles on executive compensation and intermediate sanctions for tax journals including The Journal on Taxation, Taxation of Exempts, and The Exempt Organization Tax Review.

Pam is a long-time member and past chair of the national LeadingAge Legal Committee and has served on the LeadingAge California board of directors. She was also an active participant in various LeadingAge and LeadingAge California task forces and the state committees that rewrote California’s continuing care laws and introduced "care at home" legislation.

Pam is a co-author of the annual edition of the California Continuing Education of the Bar treatise, Advising California Nonprofit Corporations, and a past Chair of the Tax-Exempt Organizations Committee of the Taxation Section of the State Bar. A recognized specialist on nonprofit and tax-exempt issues, Pam testified before the IRS on intermediate sanctions issues and regularly advocates on behalf of the charitable sector.

Pam is an advocate of plain English and simple solutions.

Areas of Focus

Education

Admissions and Courts