David M. Roth

David M. Roth brings around 45 years of legal, tax, and business planning expertise to his Louisville, Kentucky law firm of David M. Roth, PLLC, a Roth Firm Group licensee. During his career, Roth has shepherded a myriad of large and small business acquisitions and dispositions, business succession plans, private placement offerings, commercial financing transactions, thoroughbred horse transactions, sports and entertainment agency acquisitions, wholesale distribution company acquisitions, restaurant transactions, nursing home deals, real estate ventures, private foundations, and other business, securities, and investment transactions. He has had experience in negotiating and consummating international transactions in Mexico, Jamaica, France, Panama, and several other countries. Roth is a self-styled “deal junkie” who derives great pleasure from applying his creativity, knowledge, negotiating skills, and business background in helping clients structure and efficiently consummate their business and investment transactions.

One area in which Mr. Roth has focused during the last few years has been representing optometrists with respect to the sale of their practices to several private equity firms and strategic buyers that are currently in the process of consolidating (“rolling up”) that industry, as well as with respect to sales to other optometrists. Such acquisitions are somewhat complicated and unusual because the corporate practice of medicine laws in effect in most states require that most of such transactions be consummated through the use of management services agreements, employment agreements, transitional services agreements, and/or other agreements often referred to collectively as “Friendly PC Arrangements.” Mr. Roth has developed a national reputation for handling these types of transactions effectively and efficiently with an emphasis on protecting the interests of the OD’s involved.

Roth created David M. Roth, PLLC, in 2020 in order to focus on handling such optometry transactions and, in addition to his client services as a practicing attorney, Roth also continues to serve on a personal basis as the Vice Chairman and a director of Blue Equity, LLC, a private investment company headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. Among the many business and investment transactions handled by Mr. Roth in his professional capacity on behalf of Blue Equity, Roth structured and consummated the roll-up of multiple acquisition targets into consolidated platform companies which became significant players within the worldwide sports, entertainment, and TV/media industry (BEST – Blue Entertainment Television & Sports, now Lagardère Unlimited) and the U.S. Spanish yellow page industry (Sección Amarilla/Enlace). He also helped such companies grow organically and played a key role in negotiating and consummating the successful sale of such companies to large strategic international companies in such sectors. Additional information regarding Blue Equity’s current and past investments may be obtained at www.blueequity.com.

From 2017 to 2020, Roth was an attorney with the Louisville, Kentucky, law firm Lynch, Cox, Gilman & Goodman, P.S.C., where he concentrated in handling the sale of optometry practices. From 1994 to 2005, prior to joining Blue Equity, Roth was a sole practitioner or founding partner of a law firm in Louisville, Kentucky, that operated under several names as it grew (David M. Roth, P.S.C., Roth & Cooper, P.S.C., and Roth, Foley, Bryant, and Cooper).

From 1992 to 1993, Roth served as the in-house General Counsel, and was a Founding Partner, of ARM Financial Group, Inc. and its predecessor, Analytical Risk Management, during which time Roth helped ARM obtain initial funding from Morgan Stanley Leveraged Equity Fund II to enable it to acquire the U.S. operations of Australia’s second largest life insurance company and then undertake an IPO to become a public company listed on the American Stock Exchange.

For 12 years prior to that time, Roth was a partner in the Louisville law firm of Greenebaum Doll & McDonald (now known as Dentons Bingham Greenebaum), having joined such firm after starting his legal career in 1975 as an attorney in Washington, D.C. with the Internal Revenue Service, Office of the Chief Counsel, Interpretative Division.