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Bowl Leader
B4 experience will largely depend on where you wind up. International, M&A, SALT, National office are where lawyers will generally wind up and each comes with their own upside and downside. But, generally, at B4 you'll have a much more concentrated experience and will develop a lot of expertise in these areas. There will be a lot more spreadsheets and little drafting of documents (compared to biglaw). National office does more writing though. You will not get as good of training on the writing side at B4 generally - their memos are almost always delivered at a quality an early draft is expected to have at Biglaw. The technical stuff is solid, just not polished writing.
Biglaw practice will be more general usually, but you can get siloed in certain practices that are super heavy on one type of work. You will do far more drafting - memos, agreements, letters, and emails are your daily work product. I also find there is a lot more ambiguity to navigate - B4 is very good at applying the rules to concrete facts, but they defer to the lawyers on a lot of the gray-area questions. This part of the job is what I think makes Biglaw harder.
Either way, though, you're going to get good technical tax experience. It will just be very different between the two.
Law firm is also much more general tax practice and big 4 is very siloed.
At Big 4, you’re more likely to sell work and projects. At biglaw, you’re more likely an add-on to a corporate practice.
Bowl Leader
This is real. Being beholden to the corporate guys can get old fast.
If you’re an attorney it’s more money more prestige better training… might be same or likely worse WLB