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I am a stub year associate at a v10. For reasons that I would rather not get into, I have been thinking about switching my workload from 100% tax to 50/50 tax and compensation and benefits. I have significant pre-law school experience in tax and like the practice. My long term goal is to exit to an in house position as tax counsel.

My question is, would picking up hours in compensation and benefits work help, hurt, or not affect how soon I can exit? I am inclined against picking up comp and benefits if doing so would mean I would need to stay an extra year or two before I can move in house. FWIW our compensation and benefits practice is a sub-group under the tax group.

I would probably not do this unless your team is small enough where you’re required to do EBEC work (some firms have smaller tax groups that are broader in practice). If you’re at a firm that has an established group, and you show “interest” in EBEC, you will probably get pigeonholed in it and will get less and less pure tax work.

I don’t know if it will take longer for you to go in-house, but you will probably have more luck being a benefits counsel at that point.

I considered this before, for a broader practice, but then I was given more and more EBEC work to the point I lateraled to get away from it.

Thanks, both groups are pretty small because I am in a smaller office. Did you find you had problems lateralling away because you had too much experience as a comp and benefits associate?

I would do it only if you think you might want to do benefits work long-term. Once you have significant benefits expertise, there is likely to be some pressure to increase the amount of benefits work you do. It's a very niche skill set, and despite the fact that many of the rules are technically tax rules, there isn't really that much overlap between a tax practice and a benefits practice.

As for in-house roles, I'm not sure either benefits or tax is a clear winner- they are simply different roles. One thing to consider is many in-house tax counsel positions are in the tax department, while benefits is usually in the law department. You might consider if you'd prefer to mostly work with CPAs or other lawyers, though very large companies might have a big enough tax law group (i.e. Exxon) where that's less of a consideration. The benefits folks will also work quite a bit with HR, while tax rarely interacts with them.