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Coach
If you have the option to go Big Law, don’t waste your time at Big 4. Comparable work hours and unreasonable expectations for 1/3 the salary or less.
To chime in on biglaw hours - remember that in biglaw the tax group is a specialist group and generally speaking will not bill as many hours as the associates in the deal teams that they support (eg, M&A). I have been in biglaw tax doing mostly transactional work for 8 years, 6 years in V5 and aside from billing 2100 in my first year, have billed less than 2000 every year. I was not the slacker of the group, and have generally been viewed as hard working. The V5 was a sweatshop where M&A associates were regularly billing 2500-3000. So please don’t buy into the narrative that tax biglaw associates are all doing 2500+.
On terms of work, I think there is really interesting tax work to be done at the big4. You get to do some cool modeling and structuring, which you may not get to do as much of in biglaw. You do also have to do due diligence in big4, which I’ve been told is not the most exciting. I think the more interesting and highly paid work at big4 are their M&A, international tax and national office groups.
At biglaw you also get to do some structuring, maybe some easy modeling, but your bread and butter is going to be tax research and drafting and negotiating tax related provisions in documents. The drafting/negotiation work can get repetitive because the same points get negotiated again and again in deals (is there a tax indemnity, etc).
So my take is that there’s not a clear answer in terms of whether biglaw or big4 has better tax work, but compensation-wise biglaw is the clear winner.
I basically do nothing and just watch youtube all day if i'm being honest.
Big 4
TBH I started at a big 4 and then lateraled to biglaw… don’t believe these ppl that its hard to do and my wlb at big4 was way better. Maybe not my first year or so may be something to starting in big law, but that was also a terrible boss. After she left, or was pushed out, life was good, but guess depends on the firm and team. But 5/6 years in at a big 4, your billable goal will be like 1500 compared to what mine is now.
I second the recommendation to start in biglaw if you can. Much easier to make the jump from biglaw to Big4 than the reverse (although not uncommon for biglaw partners to have done some time in a Big4 national office). In biglaw, the hardest adjustment is often the 24/7 availability/responsiveness expectation rather than the actual workload (although that can ramp up at times as well). Assuming transactional, Tax juniors do a lot of research and help with drafting memos/opinions and marking up deal documents (purchase agreement, operating agreement, etc).
Agreed with going biglaw instead of accounting firm for the reasons mentioned.
Curious why you’d pick gtown or northwestern over UF? Better program at half the cost. Tax folks know. NYU is the only name worth paying the premium for.
I've heard N'western is pretty generous with scholarships. That might influence your decision.
Also NU won today. UF lost. So there's that.
Yeah somewhat similar in the northeast but it’s NYU and Georgetown then local schools.
No one from UF.