Delina Yasmeh
JD · LL.M. Taxation · State Bar of California No. 335680
Founder and principal of DELINA.ESQ, a boutique business and tax law firm in Los Angeles, bringing Big Four Mergers and Acquisitions Tax depth to the founders, creators, family enterprises, and high earners institutional firms price out.
The pedigree, and the departure from it.
She holds a Juris Doctor and a Master of Laws in Taxation from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, with an undergraduate degree in accounting underneath both. That credential combination most often produces a Big Law tax attorney or in-house counsel at a large corporation. Delina’s career began on that path, and then departed from it.
Over the following years she conducted more than 1,000 consultations with business owners across nearly every industry. The pattern was almost universal: founders, creators, operators, and high earners working through increasingly complex matters were not getting the depth of counsel the matter required, because the attorneys with that depth were serving institutional clients. She built the firm to close that gap.
Big Four to boutique.
Deloitte
M&A Tax Group · Los AngelesBegan her career in Deloitte’s Mergers and Acquisitions Tax group in Los Angeles, conducting tax due diligence for private equity firms and corporate buyers on transactions valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and calibrating structuring decisions between sign and close.
PwC
M&A Tax Group · Silicon ValleyMoved to PwC in Silicon Valley in the same Mergers and Acquisitions Tax group, advising on purchase price allocations and drafting the indemnification frameworks sellers carry through the eighteen to twenty-four months following close on institutional-scale deals.
Litigation Practice
High-Volume Trial FirmFollowing Big Four, joined the litigation side of a high-volume trial firm, managing more than 150 active matters at any given time. The chapter produced a perspective most transactional attorneys never develop: how contracts read in court, and which provisions decide outcomes when an agreement is tested.
Web3 Technology Company
Chief Financial OfficerServed for a period as Chief Financial Officer of a Web3 technology company, which placed her on the operator side of the same business questions she had been evaluating from the deal side: entity structure, fundraising path, equity distribution, and the contracts governing operating relationships.
Delina serves as a faculty affiliate at GCAS College Dublin in the Master of Laws in International Business and Tax Law program, contributing on cross-border M&A, transfer pricing, and the tax and legal questions arising from Web3, digital assets, and emerging technology.
The program, awarded by GCAS College Dublin as a member college of Woolf, is a 90 ECTS European-accredited Master of Laws focused on the intersection of business law, tax, and emerging technology.
Mitigating Multistate Risks As California Expands Tax Reach↗
Law360 Tax Authority · April 2026 · Read ↗
Beware of IRS Initiatives Against Microcaptive Insurance Arrangements
The Tax Adviser (AICPA) · November 2021
Originally Filed Return Starts Clock Ticking↗
The Tax Adviser (AICPA) · November 2020 · Read ↗
The work behind the firm.
The firm’s matter list draws on Big Four Mergers and Acquisitions Tax engagements at Deloitte and PwC and current boutique-scale work. Representative work, anonymized where confidentiality requires:
M&A transactions with deal values from low seven figures to nine figures, across wearable technology, media production, healthcare, aerospace, automotive, professional services, finance and private equity, software, e-commerce and consumer brands, insurance, and real estate.
Cross-border tax structuring, including outbound transfer analysis with gain-recognition agreements, inversion analysis on proposed restructurings, supply-chain VAT and duties analysis for European subsidiaries, and lockup planning for offshore IPO transactions.
Tax memoranda on reasonable compensation, the qualified business income deduction, qualified small business stock under the post-OBBBA framework, the Augusta Rule, real estate cost segregation, contingent earnout characterization, and the deductibility of legal expenses and settlement payments.
Entity structuring and tax planning for cannabis operators, family foundations, restaurants and hospitality, family-owned enterprises, software companies, e-commerce brands, real estate portfolios, multi-platform creators, captive insurance arrangements, and senior living facilities.
The full M&A deal sheet is at Mergers and Acquisitions.
Built for the middle of the market.
The legal industry has bifurcated. Big Law and the Big Four serve institutional clients at fees calibrated to institutional balance sheets. Template services and high-volume firms serve everyone else at fees calibrated to volume, with the depth of counsel calibrated to the same. The middle, where founders, creators, family-owned enterprises, and high earners actually operate, is structurally under-served by both ends.
DELINA.ESQ was built to occupy that middle. The credential pedigree institutional clients require is the pedigree the firm carries. The flat-fee structure aligns the firm’s incentives with the client’s outcome, not the hour count. And the integrated disciplines, contract through tax through M&A through trademark, eliminate the failure mode of advice that holds together until it crosses into the next discipline and falls apart.
Delina is admitted to the State Bar of California (Bar No. 335680). The firm operates as a Professional Corporation based in Los Angeles, representing clients across the country and on the U.S. side of cross-border transactions.
By appointment