GTP Partners with Area Tax Clinics to Offer Hands-on Experience

Students develop tax knowledge and refine lawyering skills while volunteering with local tax clinics serving communities in need.

Boston University School of Law’s Graduate Tax Program (GTP) offers students the opportunity to gain hands-on experience that complements their classroom learning and prepares them for employment. Through its partnerships with area organizations, the GTP connects students with pro bono work for organizations such as Greater Boston Legal Services and Harvard Law School’s Federal Tax Clinic.

“These partnerships not only have the benefit of providing experiential opportunities for students, but allow the program to make a significant impact in providing much needed advising assistance to Boston residents,” says GTP Director Sara Marshall.

Marshall notes that pursuing part-time experiential opportunities during the semester and during breaks is one of the best ways for students to apply their newly acquired knowledge to real-world settings—something that employers look for when recruiting recent LLM graduates.

Angela Pau (GTP’16) agrees. Now a member of Ernst & Young’s state and local tax group, Pau says experiential opportunities are one of the most valuable parts of going to law school.

“The book studying is important and you need that background and foundation,” Pau says. “But it really comes alive when you’re intersecting academics with people and the lives that are affected.”

As a student in the GTP, Pau did pro bono work for Harvard Law’s Federal Tax Clinic. She worked on 10 cases for clients, 90 percent of whom live below the poverty line.

One of her cases involved an elderly veteran’s financial disability status. Her client suffered multiple strokes, had no family and lived alone in a VA hospital. Pau helped file a claim for financial disability to abate his tax liabilities.

She says the work brings strength to the ongoing anti-poverty movement. Through the GTP’s experiential opportunities, students can “explore tax strategies that can prevent poverty going forward.”

Harvard Law Federal Tax Clinic Director Keith Fogg says the work helps students gain necessary client interaction skills and bolsters their confidence going forward.

“Even though 90 percent of students will practice transactional tax law rather than work on tax controversy issues, it’s helpful to know what happens when things go wrong,” he says. “If you can understand what happens when things go wrong, it makes you more confident to spot those issues in the future.”

While a majority of LLM students will go into major accounting firms, Marshall says the GTP’s partnerships help students refine important skills they’ll be called upon to deploy later on, such as performing valuations, analyzing and applying the tax code to specific facts, and communicating with clients.

“The skills and knowledge required to work with individual pro bono clients, and the time management and organization skills required for a student to balance a full course load with extracurricular activities, resemble the package of competencies needed to succeed at a large, private sector employer,” Marshall says. “These skills are highly transferrable.”

She is quick to point out that learning in the classroom is one thing, but taking that knowledge and advising a client with it is another. Applying classroom learning to a real situation allows the material to “really sink in and crystallize.”

Michael Steffany (GTP’15) currently works at RSM, an international accounting firm. As a member of the firm’s international tax group, Steffany often deals with individual clients whose international investments have been improperly reported. He says the skills he gained while volunteering with Greater Boston Legal Services—such as tax research, tax-based writing, and client advocacy—directly apply to the work he does today.

“Greater Boston Legal Services is a nurturing environment,” Steffany says. “You’re given real responsibilities but aren’t afraid to learn on the job. It lets you learn and grow as a tax practitioner by giving you a practical grounding and real-life examples of how the tax law you’re studying applies in the real world and affects real people.”

For Ivan Atochin (GTP’17), who volunteered for Harvard Law’s Federal Tax Clinic, it was the process of learning something from scratch that accelerated his growth.

“In many ways, it was the idea of picking something up with only basic knowledge and doing the client intake and interviewing,” says Atochin, who will work at the accounting firm KPMG after graduation. “I learned to swim by being thrown in the deep end, and I really loved it.”

Developing his professional skills while providing important services to those who need it most was extremely rewarding for Atochin. “For anybody that wants to do pro bono work, the clinic gives really hands-on experience,” he says. “It’s exactly what tax controversy work is—someone passionate about tax helping another person out.”

Reported by Greg Yang (CAS’17)

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