We want LI to be one of the friendliest places on the internet, where lawyers and law students help each other with their career related queries and occasionally discuss other stuff that might affect their lives too. In other words:
1. Be kind, respectful and helpful to each other.
2. Be bona fide, truthful, genuine and curious.
3. Assume the best intention of others.
Therefore, in using the site, you must agree to do your best to uphold these community guidelines.
Note that what you find here is written and moderated by anonymous people on the internet.
Therefore everything you read here is very likely unverified, rumour, speculation and/or downright false.
In continuing to read anything here, you must therefore agree not to take anything you read here as factual and that you will exercise due caution, diligence and common sense before acting on any information you may come across here.
You also agree to report any inaccurate or malicious comments with the buttons. Moderators take action within 24 hours, as required and appropriate under law.
Our full terms and conditions apply too.
Do you solemnly agree to all of the above?
2) Tax teams are generally support teams in T-1s with a few exceptions and also smaller in size. Therefore, post the position of counsel/PA, the competition for the partner position is tougher than the general corporate teams. There are not too many partner position openings for direct tax. Hope this answers your growth question.
3) In my view, there should no longer be any doubt in anyone's mind that the concept of execution partner is a dying concept and unless you have strong books, your vertical growth is limited to counsel/PA after which you will most likely be shown the door.
4) Unless your direct tax law expertise as a lawyer is supplemented by additional professional course like CA/CS/ACCA/CFA/ or any other regarded accounting course, your journey as a lateral to inhouse/advisory tax firms will be severely impacted since most of the companies/advisory companies look for a person who is adept at compliances.
5) If you are considering litigation role in direct tax, the opportunities are extremely limited when it comes to firms. AZB, Trilegal, DMD, Vaish, and a few other firms have dedicated direct tax litigation roles. When it comes to companies, you may look at companies like Adani, Reliance, who are big enough to accommodate these specialized roles. However, the issue is that for these tax roles, the minimum required experience is 7+ years and people vying for that role are too many. The alternate is to look for chambers who take up large chunk of tax work - Mr. Aravind Datar, Mr. Percy Pardiwala, Mr. Porus Kaka, Mr. Balbir Singh. However, the expectations regarding the salary should accordingly be set as the pay can't match T1. It's abysmal for most.
6) If we consider going independent, please bear in mind that the work in tax is drying up (definitely not wanting to draw a grim picture here but speaking from experience of close to 4 years) and whatever work is there is in the hands of a few individuals since everyone is bent on undercutting each other in this area of law, even the senior advocates. The fee benchmarks which have been set are terrible. It would take close to 7 years to build a sustainable practice so I would recommend not to keep your eggs in one basket. If you have any more questions, please send a follow up.
Is the salary and growth equal for let's say Gen Copr, Deals team, B&F?
Or is it lower than them?
Please give you inputs