<p>This article appeared in today’s Wall Street Journal. It discusses some of the challenges that the government faces in hiring top law school grads. I’ve copied it here for you.</p>
<p>It’s Taxing to Recruit Top Law Grads
To IRS, but a New Push Betters Returns
By ROBERT GUY MATTHEWS
October 10, 2006; Page B1</p>
<p>NEW HAVEN, Conn. – Donald Korb, chief counsel of the Internal Revenue Service, sits in a high-back chair in a meeting room lined with law books and prepares to talk to a small gathering of Yale Law School students about tax shelters.</p>
<p>But before delivering his lecture, he delivers a sales pitch – for jobs at the IRS: Work a 40-hour week (more or less). Get into a courtroom within the first month. Choose the city where you work. “I can’t say enough about the value to your career,” he concludes, breathlessly. “And that’s my commercial.”</p>
<p>It isn’t subtle, and it seems to work. A couple of students reach for the informational folders and CDs stacked on a coffee table.</p>
<p>For decades, the IRS, employer of 1,500 lawyers, failed to draw freshly scrubbed graduates from the country’s top law schools. It recruited in the spring, instead of the preceding fall when the private firms did. “All the good ones were gone by then,” Mr. Korb says. When it did find promising candidates, it left many of them in limbo for months; private firms usually respond within weeks. And then there’s the pay: about $65,000 to $70,000, depending on location, for a first-year lawyer at the IRS. That’s half the starting rate at private firms.</p>
<p>It’s no wonder few of the smartest young minds in tax law considered starting their careers at the IRS. As a result, the IRS frequently finds itself out-manned and out-maneuvered by corporations or rich individuals, who hire pricey private lawyers to craft and defend sophisticated schemes to dodge taxes.</p>
<p>Mr. Korb – J.D., Case Western Reserve University School of Law; LL.M., Georgetown University Law Center – is out to change that. He says a few early years at the IRS is a big boost to a tax lawyer’s career. His message seems to be sinking in. A wave of new graduates from law schools at Yale, New York University and the University of Southern California begin work next month, the first stream of new lawyers from those top-tier schools to join the IRS in years. In all, the IRS has 1,500 applicants so far for the 50 spots it wants to fill over the next 12 months.</p>
<p>Deborah Egurrola, 28 years old, who graduated from Yale Law School in June, says she turned down a $125,000- a-year offer from a Washington D.C. law firm, and a $105,000 offer from a Miami law firm, to take a $66,000 offer to work in the IRS’s chief counsel’s office.</p>
<p>“The IRS really throws you right into the thick of things,” Ms. Egurrola says. “At a lot of law firms, you have to start with more behind-the-scenes work. Here you start interacting with attorneys from outside.” She says she can afford to take the lower-paying job because her parents have agreed to help her pay back her $75,000 in student loans.</p>
<p>Nina Kang, 26, a third-year USC law student, decided to join the IRS’s Los Angeles office after working there as a summer intern. “For me, I didn’t think that it was worth it to suffer for two years at a private firm and never see the light of day,” she says. “I have heard of some people billing 15 to 20 hours a day for weeks on end. I have outside interests instead of working non-stop.”</p>
<p>Ms. King, who has $140,000 in student loans, says the IRS would have an easier time recruiting if it offered ways to help students pay their debts. Some law schools give graduates more time to pay back loans if they go to work for a nonprofit; some private firms, as part of hiring packages, help recruits pay their loans. The IRS can’t afford such largesse.</p>
<p>Mr. Korb’s campaign has a few kinks. Lindsay Clayton, 24, a third-year law student at Yale, says Mr. Korb interviewed her last fall and sparked her interest. But the private firms where she interviewed called her back within a week for subsequent interviews. It took the IRS five weeks, and even then the agency wanted her to go to further interviews for a job that wasn’t the one Mr. Korb had described. She declined. Another division within the IRS called her a few weeks later offering interviews for another job. Again she declined.</p>
<p>Brian Jenn, 29, is a third-year Yale law student with a graduate degree in economics who did a stint working on tax policy on the staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He says he applied for a job with the IRS Chief Counsel’s Office two years ago. When he called to inquire about his application after a few weeks, he recalls, “I was told if anyone was interested that they would have contacted me.” He refused to apply again when the new-and-improved IRS came calling. He plans to join the Washington office of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom when he graduates.</p>
<p>Mr. Korb says it is true that a tendency to bungle applications caused the IRS to lose many promising applicants. He says he has hired a full-time recruiter and has set up a hiring committee to make sure no one else falls through the cracks.</p>
<p>Mary Maher, associate director for the Masters of Law in Taxation program at Northwestern University Law School, says the IRS is turning around its image. Last year, three graduates of the program took IRS jobs. “I heard back…and they have no regrets,” she says. “All the marketing is sort of paying off.”</p>
<p>Mr. Korb is especially proud of the IRS’s slick marketing campaign and recruiting material. The bright green-and-purple folders and CDs contain something only tax geeks may find appealing: A list of famous – at least in tax circles – IRS alumni, including Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the Chicago White Sox and the Chicago Bulls; Pam Olson, a former Treasury Department official and now a partner at Skadden Arps; and Ronald Pearlman, a former Treasury Department and congressional tax official and now a Georgetown professor.</p>
<p>Write to Robert Guy Matthews at <a href="mailto:robertguy.matthews@wsj.com">robertguy.matthews@wsj.com</a></p>