David Langdon Raish was born on March 12, 1947, in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of John Raish and Roslyn Skeels. He grew up in Willoughby, Ohio, with his parents and his sister, Jocelyn.
He attended Hawken School, from which he graduated in 1965. Hawken was founded in 1915 by James A. Hawken, who opened it as a school for boys in Cleveland's Hough neighborhood. The school did not become coeducational until 1975.
After Hawken, Raish enrolled at Yale University, which traces its origins to 1701 and is located in New Haven, Connecticut. He received a Bachelor of Arts in 1969. While at Yale he sang with the Whiffenpoofs, a singing group that is described as the world's oldest collegiate a cappella group.
He then studied at Harvard Law School, founded in 1817 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received a Juris Doctor in 1973 and was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, the student-edited journal that the school has published since 1887.
Raish began his legal career as a law clerk to Judge James R. Browning of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, a clerkship held from 1973 to 1974. The Ninth Circuit is the federal appellate court for a large region of the western United States.
In 1974 he joined Ropes & Gray in Boston, a firm founded in 1865 by John Codman Ropes and John Chipman Gray, both Harvard-trained lawyers. After 1878, when the firm added William C. Loring and was renamed Ropes, Gray & Loring, its practice moved toward corporate law. Raish worked as an associate until 1982, when he became a partner. He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1975 and to the District of Columbia bar in 1981. For several years in the 1980s he practiced in the firm's Washington, D.C., office while living in Maryland, and he started a benefits lunch group for benefits lawyers that continued for well over twenty years.
From 1990 to 2001 he headed Ropes & Gray's Employee Benefits Department. His practice concentrated on retirement plans, deferred compensation, and other employee benefit matters under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, the federal statute that regulates private employee benefit plans. Most of his clients were tax-exempt employers, particularly universities and health-care organizations.
Raish also contributed to the professional literature on employee benefits. He wrote the Tax Management Portfolio on cafeteria plans, which examines their federal income taxation under Section 125 of the Internal Revenue Code, and he co-authored the portfolio on cash or deferred arrangements. He was a frequent speaker for American Law Institute-American Bar Association programs, and in 2010 he co-chaired a program in Washington, D.C., on the retirement and welfare plans of tax-exempt and governmental employers. He also served on the Board of Advisors of the Journal of Taxation of Employee Benefits and on the Editorial Advisory Board of the American Bar Association publication The Tax Lawyer.
Raish retired as a partner of Ropes & Gray. He died at home in Little Compton, Rhode Island, on September 29, 2022, at the age of 75, after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.
(Tax Management Portfolio in the Bloomberg Tax series, wri...)
Cash or Deferred Arrangements (Portfolio 358)
(Tax Management Portfolio on cash or deferred arrangements...)
Raish was inducted as a Charter Fellow of the American College of Employee Benefits Counsel in 2000. The organization brings together practitioners in employee benefits law, the field in which he specialized under ERISA. At Yale he sang with the Whiffenpoofs, the a cappella group that is described as the world's oldest collegiate a cappella group.
Raish was the son of John Raish and Roslyn Skeels, and he had a sister, Jocelyn.
He married Roslyn Anne Dinnick on September 12, 1969. The couple had three children, Julia, Anne, and David.
