I Don't Like Working as an Accountant at the Big 4, Maybe I Should Go to Law School?

One of our readers asked whether we were aware of people leaving the Big 4 to take nice jobs. Of course. But it depends on what you call a nice job, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is a good topic, so we will dedicate a few separate posts to it, exploring different avenues of departure from the Big 4.

One very smart/dumb move that a lot of Big 4 accountants make is to leave the Big 4 to go to law school. A few people we know worked at the Big 4 for a couple years, then went to law school, and are now doing pretty well for themselves at big law firms or having started their own business/tax law firm. For example, one guy we know went to law school after getting his CPA license, worked at a big law firm for a couple years negotiating big deals, and then left to start his own practice providing CFO and general counsel services to start-ups and high-net-worth individuals.

But law school and lawyering is definitely not for everybody. Although, if you are going to spend the rest of your days punching numbers in a dark cubicle at the Big 4 anyway, you might want to consider upgrading to a big law firm. Let's compare some of the high-level differences between entry-level lawyers versus entry-level accountants:

Lawyers v. Accountants

1. Starting Salary. This is by far one of the most obvious differences between Big Accounting and Big Law. Starting salaries at a big law firm are double and triple what they are at the Big 4, with most Big law firms in the big cities paying $145,000 to $160,000 to its starting lawyers, and those salaries usually go up $5,000 to $10,000 each year after that. On top of that, after the first year, starting lawyers are usually paid a year-end bonus of anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000. Of course, the recession has rained on that parade a little, and many law firms froze or lowered salaries this past year by 10-20%. Also bear in mind coming out of law school you will have lots of debt, maybe even as much as $100,000 in school loans unless daddy is paying for it or you go to a less-expensive state-run school like U. of Texas or a church-run school like BYU.

2. Your Own Office. Lawyers usually get their own office right out of law school at a big law firm. And we are not talking about a glorified cubicle with a door and four walls that go almost to the ceiling. We are talking a real office with a real solid desk and and other furniture, and a nice view of something spectacular: the city skyline, a famous bridge, a body of water, or in Los Angeles, a nice big freeway.

Accountant cubicle:

Lawyer office (note the large volumes of boxes and papers everywhere -- we'll get to that later):

3. Work. Junior accountants in general spend all day hunched over a laptop preparing spreadsheets and looking for numbers. Junior attorneys spend all day at their desks drafting agreements, or researching cases and writing memos, or going through boxes and boxes of documents looking for smoking guns (see the boxes in the picture above). It's tough to objectively compare whether the work of junior attorneys is any less tedious than the work of junior accountants. Some prefer working with spreadsheets and numbers because when everything balances out at the end of the day -- you know you have it right. With legal research and writing and document searching, there is no real check to make sure you have the right answer -- you may have missed something big and will never know, or you will find out when the other side discovers it and you lose the case.

4. Hours. Hours vary so much across firms, projects, and seasons, that it is tough to compare hours worked by junior accountants with hours worked by junior attorneys. As a benchmark, most big law firms require their attorneys to work more hours than the Big 4. For example, the billable hour requirement at a Big 4 firm might be 1500 hours, while most big law firms expect 1900 - 2100 hours of their attorneys. The major difference is that accountants usually get more breaks and longer breaks between crunch times, while attorney hours stay high all year long except for short vacations.

Please chime in with your own observations . . .