Tax lawyers advise clients on tax planning and appear in assessments and appeals. Work is dense, deadline driven and file heavy, so juniors need careful training, and seniors need a way to share review without losing quality.
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Share your requirementsA tax law practice advises businesses and individuals on tax questions, drafts opinions, replies to notices and appears before appellate authorities and courts. A senior advocate or partner leads, with associates who research and draft, tax professionals or accountants who work out numbers, paralegals who prepare paper books, and clerks who handle filing and listing. Files are thick with orders, replies, accounts and statements. Dates for reply and appeal are fixed, and a late filing can end a client's chance. Opinions need careful reading of the facts and the law, and a junior's first drafts need heavy changes. Clients, often owners of firms, call at all hours with tax worries. Associates with a good record are sought by large companies and consultancies. See also HR for tax law firms.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in tax lawyers. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
A lapsed date for appeal or reply can end the case, and the diary is a constant worry.
A junior spends days reading orders and accounts just to understand what has already been argued.
Seniors rewrite instead of coaching, and juniors learn little from the changes.
Every opinion and appeal draft goes to one person, and quality and speed both suffer.
The tax analyst's working and the associate's argument do not match, and nobody reconciles them.
Owners phone before a notice date and expect immediate opinions, interrupting drafting.
Client financial statements and returns move through personal mail and chat.
Corporate tax teams offer fixed hours and steady pay to those with appeal experience.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Policies, Compliance and Governance; Retention and Attrition Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for professional services, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a tax lawyers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
All reply, appeal and hearing dates by matter, with two owners and weekly review.
All reply, appeal and hearing dates by matter, with two owners and weekly review. Plan cover with leave rules.
Facts, orders, arguments made, pending dates and numbers, updated after each event.
Facts, orders, arguments made, pending dates and numbers, updated after each event. Keep in documentation.
Seniors comment on structure and reasoning, not only wording, with a short debrief.
Seniors comment on structure and reasoning, not only wording, with a short debrief. See learning plans.
Checklists for common replies and appeals, two trained reviewers and partner sign-off on hard cases.
Checklists for common replies and appeals, two trained reviewers and partner sign-off on hard cases.
A joint check where analyst and associate agree the figures before they appear in a filing.
A joint check where analyst and associate agree the figures before they appear in a filing.
Who may hold client accounts, how they are shared and what applies on leaving.
Who may hold client accounts, how they are shared and what applies on leaving. Teach it in onboarding.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Cover for limitation dates and heavy hearing weeks.
File summaries and role descriptions that make handovers safe.
Coaching on reasoning that makes juniors independent sooner.
New staff learn data handling rules from the first day.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in professional services, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Why associates and managers leave consulting, accounting, legal and advisory firms, and how to ask about progression, workload and partners at exit.
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A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
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How an India head can sort a global parent's HR policies into apply, adapt or replace, write an India addendum with advisers, and keep headquarters on side.
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What really keeps mobile app and web developers in a small firm: stay conversations, growth paths, fair release rules and a risk sheet an owner can use this month.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Use one diary, two owners per date and a weekly review. A date owned by one person is a risk.
Keep a running summary on each matter and walk them through it. Reading orders alone is slow and error prone.
Comment on structure and reasoning and explain why. Silent rewriting teaches nothing.
Use checklists, train reviewers and reserve partner time for hard matters.
Offer early responsibility, visible progress and fair pay. You may not match fixed hours, so be honest about the trade.
How dates are tracked, how files are summarised, how reviews are shared and why associates leave. A diary rule, a file summary format or a review plan is a likely start. Scope, timing and fees are put in writing after that talk.
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