Herman Spence Receives Tax Law Lifetime Achievement and Service Award

Robinson Bradshaw attorney Herman Spence III received the North Carolina Bar Association Tax Section’s Tax Law Lifetime Achievement and Service Award for 2025.

Spence, only the third recipient of the award, was honored at the Section’s annual meeting. The award recognizes Spence’s “outstanding professional work and exemplary reputation in tax matters” and his “extraordinary service to the Section, the legal profession and the public in endeavors relating to the field of tax law and the mission and activities of the Section.”

Spence has been an attorney at Robinson Bradshaw for more than 40 years, first joining the firm in 1983 after clerking on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He has earned a reputation for his encyclopedic breadth and depth of tax knowledge, gained in part through his counsel across the firm’s practice areas spanning corporate, litigation, real estate, and trusts and estates matters. Among others, this includes work on mergers and acquisitions, private fund formation, complex partnerships, solar energy investment funds, public finance, executive compensation, nonprofit organizations, and tax audits and appeals.

In addition to chairing Robinson Bradshaw’s tax department, Spence has also served as the chair of the Mecklenburg Bar Association’s Tax Section, a board member and editor of the NCBA Tax Section Newsletter, a member of the National Association of Bond Lawyers and a member of the UNC-Chapel Hill board of visitors.

Spence earned both his law degree with high honors and his bachelor’s degree with honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a member of both Order of the Coif and Phi Beta Kappa, as well as a John Motley Morehead Law Fellow. He is consistently recognized in legal award publications including Chambers, Best Lawyers and North Carolina Super Lawyers.