Tax v. Other Transactional Forum

[Anonymous User]

What are the pros and cons of tax vs. M&A, and other transactional groups?

[Sackboy]

This has to be one of the lowest effort posts of all time. Plus, anon abuse. Just the cherry on top.

[Pictureframeleaf]

Take some advanced classes (corporate, partnership, international, etc.) to see if you like tax or not. If you don't like it then the practical pros and cons don't really matter, as doing tax while not being at least somewhat interested in it sounds like an endless nightmare.

[nealric]

This has to be one of the lowest effort posts of all time. Plus, anon abuse. Just the cherry on top.

In general, we try to give posters the benefit of the doubt regarding the anon feature. A post that may not be identifying in isolation may be if you view the poster's broader history. I will out someone if they are using it to pick a fight with a poster or be otherwise abusive.

To the OP: you are posing a rather broad question, but a few general points:

1) Tax tends to be a support group rather than a primary group. While a good tax group will have tax only clients, they tend to service the business of the corporate group. Being a major rainmaker as a tax attorney is a bit harder than as a corporate attorney. On the other hand, good experienced tax folks can be very hard to find and are in demand.

2) Tax requires a larger body of specialized knowledge. Any educated person could do most jr. associate corporate work, legal training or not. As such, many corporate juniors don't feel like they are really doing law. However, that does not mean there isn't significant knowledge or skill utilized by corporate lawyers. A lot of that knowledge comes from knowing the market for a specific kind of deal, so it's very experience focussed that can't just be learned in a book. Tax, on the other hand, is more book knowledge focused.

3) Tax work is less highly leveraged (often less than one associate per partner). You will likely work more directly with partners in the tax group as a junior, where as jr. corporate associates are often mostly working with more senior associates.

4) Hours tend to be more steady in tax. Corporate is often feast or famine. You'll sit around waiting for work one week, and then pull all nighters the next. Tax is a bit more steady. That can be good or bad. There's less mindless work in tax, so the hours can be more draining. It's really hard to focus on technical tax problem solving 12 hours into a 14 hour day. By contrast, jr. corporate associates may just be running stuff to the printers in the middle of the night- exhausting, but not intellectually taxing.

5) Jr. associate work in tax involves a lot of research and memo writing type assignments. That's a lot more rare in corporate (though it does happen).

6) Tax tends to work on a larger number of matters. You may be working on a dozen different deals at once providing more discrete input. In corporate, as single deal can dominate your life for an extended period of time. There's good and bad to that. One downside is that time entries are a total pain, as you are often making a lot of small time entries instead of billing big chunks.