Ellis Duncan: Leading Georgetown Law’s Graduate Tax Program

ELLIS DUNCAN: This was not the job that I had ever envisioned when I started law school or when I did my LLM, but it’s been the most fulfilling job that I could have ever imagined.

ALEX POWELL: Attending Georgetown is one of the best decisions that I have ever made. Ellis, you did your undergrad at Tulane in management, and then you stayed for law school. What drew you specifically to the law after a business degree? And then what made you stay within New Orleans as well?

ELLIS DUNCAN: That is a great question. So I did a business degree in international management, Latin American studies. And then I guess it’s a funny story I’ll tell. I sort of thought I was thinking about either becoming a CPA or becoming a lawyer. And I wasn’t sure which of those paths that I wanted. And I ended up doing both. A very practical decision on my part. So I got a master’s of accounting and I left New Orleans to come to GW up here in DC for a year.

And I guess there was just part of me that missed New Orleans a lot. I really missed the community there. I missed the festivals. I missed the school that I went to. And it was a little bit of a no-brainer for me to end up wanting to go back to Tulane. There was a year in between college and law school where I did my master’s, but I ended up back at Tulane and in New Orleans where I thought I was going to begin my career there.

I decided to go to law school. I thought with a master’s in accounting, a CPA, and a law degree, there was a lot that I could do, but there was also a lot that I didn’t know at the same time, including that I wouldn’t end up being in New Orleans, which was part of the interesting story. I came back to New Orleans thinking that I was going to practice there. And then when I discovered tax, I was encouraged by a lot of people that I talked to. Explore opportunities in larger cities. Not that New Orleans is not a great place to be a lawyer, but the opportunities for a sophisticated tax practice are limited there.

ALEX POWELL: You joined EY’s New York M&A tax practice straight out of Tulane. How did that experience set the bar for you for what you expected out of Dewey & LeBoeuf when you arrived there in 2006?

ELLIS DUNCAN: I don’t know that I fully appreciated what I was getting into when I joined EY’s M&A group. I wouldn’t say that I came into that job with significant tax knowledge. I had taken a basic federal income tax class in law school and then I took a combined partnership and corporate class, and then I took a class on tax policy. And unfortunately, that was the extent of the offerings at my law school.

I loved my time at EY. I will say that it was an amazing place to start my career. The training at the Big Four is fantastic. I think that there is formal training. I think that I spent my first three months doing a lot of individual classes, group classes there. I learned a lot and that helped sort of bridge the gap between what I didn’t learn in law school and what I needed to know on the job.

And then there’s a lot of great informal training there as well. I had an associate mentor, I had a partner mentor. The great thing about EY is that a lot of the work there is in teams. So me being a junior lawyer without any tax background, that was a great place for me to start because with a team, you’re always—it’s not just you, it’s a team of usually mostly more experienced people than you. And that was really helpful for me to learn my way not only into the technical aspects, but also client development as well.

ALEX POWELL: Give us the day-to-day of what that was like for you at that time in New York City at EY.

ELLIS DUNCAN: It was exciting. The bread and butter of an M&A practice in a Big Four is due diligence. Usually it’s for prospective buyers. It could be a corporate buyer. It could be private equity. Every transaction was a little bit different, involved a different—you know, that was one of the great things about starting at EY because you learn a lot, both in terms of tax, but every single deal is a little bit different. There is a different business objective. So you learn about that. There are usually different entities involved. And so you’re learning about that. It’s not just corporate entities. It’s pass-through entities, LLCs, S-corps, partnerships. There are cross-border aspects to everything. And so I saw the connection of all of those areas intersect with corporate tax, which was the firm’s focus as well.

I had a relatively good attitude about being a team player and accepting what the partners and others wanted me to do. And so my second and third year I started doing a lot of more technical corporate work, a lot of opinion work, really corporate—thinking about corporate restructurings, reorganizations, and spinoffs. So a lot of opinion work, a lot of it was post-deal where one corporate entity would acquire another company and want the company integrated into its consolidated group. And a lot of times that involved its own structuring after the deal, which I was involved in—a lot of opinion work. And that was fantastic. I think that that was some of the best, highly technical, really interesting work that I got throughout my career.

So it was a great place to start. There’s a lot of different kinds of projects that a young associate would be involved in at a Big Four. But I was lucky. I saw a little bit of everything that first year and then segued into more of the corporate restructuring in my second and third years there.

ALEX POWELL: You moved to Dewey & LeBoeuf in New York and then to Ropes & Gray in Boston and DC. That’s three stops in roughly 10 years. What were you learning at each stage that built upon the knowledge and experience you had gained previously?

ELLIS DUNCAN: That’s a great question. I think that at EY, I learned the value of teamwork. I think that many times your deals and projects at a Big Four like EY—you’re working in teams. So it’s not just you alone. And which is why I think it’s a great place for a junior lawyer to start because you have a lot more senior people there to bounce ideas off. And so I never felt like I was going it alone. There were always many others there to help guide me along the way. So I would say I learned the value of teamwork. I also learned the value of just, you know, reaching out and asking those questions—like, you’re supposed to ask questions. And I think a lot of junior people get into roles and they don’t understand the scope of what they’re being asked to do. And they are afraid to ask questions. And I learned quickly that I absolutely needed guidance from more senior people.

So when I moved to Dewey, the structure of many transactions—I really was not working on a team. Most of the time it was perhaps me and one partner working with the corporate team on a transaction. But on the tax side of things, on the planning side, it was usually just me and a partner, or I would be working on multiple deals with multiple partners. I think that the hours, they were pretty intense in a big law firm. So I think that I had to learn organizational skills. I really had to learn how to prioritize tasks and communicate with the people who I was working with to make sure that I understood what the true deadline is for everything. And on many transactions, if I was working for the same partner, it was not uncommon for me to work for one or two partners on several matters at the same time. And the important question for a junior person is to ask what to prioritize. You could be working on four or five matters and you need to know which of these is the most pressing, what is the most time sensitive and where you should allocate your time.

Now, moving from Dewey to Ropes & Gray, that was actually substantively a very different job than the move from EY to Dewey, because I moved from doing what was essentially corporate tax, almost exclusively working for corporate clients, to working for private equity and hedge fund clients. So there’s different kinds of transactions, different kinds of business objectives. And most importantly, I had to move from knowing corporate tax to knowing partnership tax and international tax. And a lot of my students tell me that they don’t want to take partnership tax because it’s hard, or they don’t necessarily understand the value of it if they want to go into a corporate practice. And I always say, no, you absolutely have to take partnership tax. And I was certainly glad that I did take partnership tax when I moved over to Ropes & Gray because I needed it day in, day out. I pulled out my outline. I couldn’t imagine having to learn partnership tax on the job.

So I think at Ropes & Gray, I learned the value of needing to pivot. And sometimes your career leads you to having to do something completely different.

ALEX POWELL: Dewey filed for bankruptcy in 2012, and its leadership faced fraud indictments two years later. How did that news confirm or reshape the calculus you made in 2008 when you chose a different platform?

ELLIS DUNCAN: The news was a little bit shocking to all of us who had worked there. I would say at the time that the firm got indicted, the majority of the people that I had worked with had already joined other firms anyway. I had just left earlier than some other people within the tax practice there.

I didn’t have a lot of experience with the merged firm. I started with the legacy Dewey Ballantine firm that merged with LeBoeuf Lamb, another New York-based law firm. I think it was either the end of 2007 or the beginning of 2008, and I left mid-2008. So I don’t know that I have a lot of experience or a lot to say about the merged firm.

What I would say is my reasons for moving were twofold. First, the tax practice there doubled in size and the scope of the work was a lot different than what I had done beforehand. So that sort of made me start to think about whether the merged firm was the right fit for me. And the second reason that I guess I left that firm was more of a geographic consideration. I was looking to relocate. I love New York City, but I think that I lived in New York City at that point for six years. And I was looking for geographically a little bit of a different city.

I had done my LLM and my master’s degree in Washington, D.C. I really had fond memories of living in D.C. And an opportunity with Ropes & Gray came about in the earlier part of 2008 to join. I was sitting in D.C., but I was really working for a lot of people in Boston. But coming down to D.C. was a very intriguing prospect for me. And so I think most of my—you know, the reason that I left was mostly geographic, was to sort of build a new life here in Washington, which I love, by the way. I love living in D.C.

The tax community here is so dynamic. And I always think of Washington—I always tell people I think it’s the center of the tax universe because it is. And it’s a very exciting place to be a tax lawyer.

ALEX POWELL: What was your experience like studying in D.C. when you were younger?

ELLIS DUNCAN: Oh, fantastic. A wonderful place to study. I’ll say the LLM program in particular was my favorite year of school. I hope you feel that way too, because I definitely feel that the LLM program was phenomenal.

I think the real drawing point for me, one thing that I really enjoyed that I think a lot of my students enjoy, and it’s sort of a Washington thing too, is just the number of adjunct faculty working in so many different interesting places. They’ve come in and out of the government. Sometimes some of my professors actually either drafted the legislation that I was studying or drafted administrative guidance. They worked at the IRS, working on a regulation, writing rulings. And just to have that sort of insight into the classroom, I thought was just phenomenal. And it’s just one of those things that it’s a very D.C.-centric sort of experience, I guess, coming to Georgetown for my LLM.

What I really enjoyed about D.C. was just the dynamic of people’s careers sort of intersecting with the government and the experience that they gain there, bringing that experience back into private practice, bringing it back into the classroom.

ALEX POWELL: Attending Georgetown is one of the best decisions that I have ever made. And as a part-time evening student working full-time, I feel so supported by the professors within this endeavor to challenge myself in such a productive way. And approaching the end of the first year, I’m very glad that I still have one more year left. It’s honestly hard to imagine only having one year at Georgetown.

ELLIS DUNCAN: I hope that—I know that my peers, colleagues, fellow students, that they’re making the most of the experience because it’s necessarily time limited. It goes from August to May before you know it. I know I sort of—I’m honest when I say that it was the best year. I feel like it was the best year of my life because I just learned so much and I met so many people.

And when I talk to prospective students and even, you know, current students at orientation and I tell you that it will fly by, I’m not kidding because it really does. And you just sort of get into it and you’re almost absorbed by your classes and all of the activities that are part of this program. And it’s almost sad. I feel bad for the students who have to leave in six weeks. So we’re glad you’re here for another year. I think that’s good.

ALEX POWELL: Ellis, you had the resume to stay in big law, in M&A tax indefinitely—two AmLaw 50 shops, blue chip deal work. What moment between 2010 and 2012 convinced you that building the country’s largest graduate tax program at Georgetown Law would create more leverage than billing another decade of deals?

ELLIS DUNCAN: That’s a great question. Making partner at any of these firms or any other firm for that matter is really hard. I saw that not only would I need to probably bill significantly more than 2,000 hours, which is the minimum. The associates who did make partner were billing probably 2,500 or more hours per year. You also have two other jobs if you want to go up the chain in a law firm. You have the job of client development. You need to be able to, at some point, make a business case for yourself at most firms, at least. And that requires additional work outside of your client commitments.

And you and I know that there’s also—as a tax lawyer, you have professional development work. That is a continuing piece of your practice as a tax lawyer—you have to be keeping up with changes in the law. You have to go to conferences. You have to be involved in the community. A lot of times you’re speaking on panels, you’re writing articles, you’re—in your case—doing a podcast, which I think is wonderful. There are all kinds of things that you have to do to develop yourself professionally.

To be honest, I have other—I love my job and I love tax, but I have other interests outside of having three jobs wrapped into one and making a run for partner somewhere. So what did this look like? I guess this was 2011 when I ended up finally going through the process of thinking about what it was that I wanted to do next.

And I sort of saw three different buckets of things. And the first bucket was a smaller firm, right? So a smaller firm, less of a commitment, a more reasonable work-life balance. The second bucket was interesting because I was thinking about, you know, making government a career, like possibly transitioning off to, say, the IRS. I really kind of had my sights set on, you know, the corporate division at the IRS, like maybe going into the corporate group at the IRS, which unfortunately at the time was not hiring. There was a hiring freeze there, which happens pretty frequently at the IRS.

And the third bucket was the—I don’t know—what else can one do with a background in tax law that is not working for a big law firm or a law firm at all, and maybe not even practicing. So sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know, right? And that’s the truth.

So I sort of approached this part of my career as I did when I started my career as a tax lawyer. I did pretty extensive networking and ended up at Georgetown just sort of by chance because I had a networking meeting with the former director of the tax program, Albert Lauber, who’s now a judge of the Tax Court. And I’d originally approached him about, you know, sort of like being in transition, wanting to think about kind of ways to segue into the government, perhaps, wanting to get his thoughts.

And I think that through the course of the meeting—a good networking meeting, you don’t know where it’s going to take you. And you don’t know what kind of information you’re going to get out of that meeting. And what I did learn, I came away from the meeting learning that he actually needed to hire an assistant director to come design, help design courses for a contract that we had received from the IRS to put on some CLE and also help develop the first online program at Georgetown, like take us into the online space. And so I said I was very interested, sign me up, and end of 2011, I joined Georgetown.

That was never on my bingo card. That was not—this was not the job that I had ever envisioned when I started law school or when I did my LLM. But it’s been the most fulfilling job that I could have ever imagined.

And this was sort of just in the back of my mind as I was going fourth year, fifth year, sixth year at a law firm. One thing that I just was not seeing was the impact of my work on the day-to-day lives of people. And I’m not saying that everybody needs to see that. But for me, I felt like that was important. And I just—like, when you’re working with mostly institutional clients, corporate clients, you’re not really seeing—you come home at the end of the day and you’re not sure that you’ve made a positive impact. And I’m not saying—I absolutely am not saying that. A lot of times you can get that through other things—do pro bono work, all kinds of ways to do that. But for me, that was actually something that was nagging at me a little bit.

And when I came to Georgetown, it really occurred to me that a lot of what I’m doing day to day is working with and helping students directly. And so this is why I’ve stayed here for as long as I’ve been here—because I’ve had the opportunity to work with thousands of students. And I’ve really seen them, the impact that I can provide to their lives. And I’ve seen them go on and have fantastic careers. And it’s really rewarding.

ALEX POWELL: You advise roughly 250 tax LLM candidates each year, and you’re curating a menu of more than 50 courses. What did that role look like with Judge Lauber, who I’m sure ran a fantastic program as well? The nature of the times changing over the last decade plus, how has the operating system within the graduate tax program changed since then?

ELLIS DUNCAN: Yeah, believe it or not, a lot has not changed since I was a student. Like, I was able to take advantage of a lot of the same courses that you are now. There are a lot of professors who are currently teaching that were teaching back when I was a student. So there was a lot that is actually somewhat similar over the years.

What I think has changed in the last, say, 20 years is the composition of our student body. And that has made—it’s required me to think about education a little bit differently. To step back, I would say 20 years ago the program was—there were a lot of part-time students such as yourself. Like, that was actually the majority of the program, part-time students who were coming in and taking classes in the evening. Not a lot of full-time students and virtually no international students, maybe a handful of foreign-trained students.

Now, if you fast forward, say, 20 years, we still are—we’re kind of evenly split between the full-time and part-time populations. But many of the part-time students now are online students. So they’re not in D.C. They’re all over the country and some places all over the world. So we’ve had to adapt to technology to make sure that we can deliver an education to not only practitioners here in D.C., but to various places throughout the country, improve our technology and really train our faculty to be able to speak to a different audience.

The other thing that has changed is the growth in the international students that are part of the program. When I, again, when I was a student, there were probably maybe a handful of foreign-trained tax LLMs. And in previous years, we’ve had over 40. I think we have 35 foreign-trained LLMs. And these are students who usually come to the program with some background in tax law, but they don’t have background in the U.S. legal system. So it’s—you know, has required me to think about the education that’s right for them, making sure that they can get the education that they need, the coursework they need, not only if they want to work here in the United States after the program, but also if they want to take the New York bar exam or another bar exam that requires additional coursework.

So I guess a lot of things have not changed, including some of the classes that we offer and professors, but the student body has changed substantially. And that has led me to think a lot differently about the curriculum.

ALEX POWELL: You’ve created the Taxation Interview Program at Georgetown, which brings employers on campus to interview your students. You’ve also built a tax careers symposium with Big Four alumni panels and practitioner panels as well. For 10 straight years, 90% or more of your U.S. graduates have been employed by October following graduation. What are you doing behind the scenes to make those numbers happen?

ELLIS DUNCAN: I need to give full credit to our graduate career office, who I think really are the reason that we have such strong placement statistics out of the program. Of course, I think that the Georgetown name itself is helpful being a very top program. I think the market for tax still remains strong throughout those years. But I think that the driving factor has really been—I will fully give kudos to my colleague, Caroline Springer, who is our assistant dean of graduate careers, who actually started her role around the same time that I came in as director of the tax program.

And she was very much—she’s very much a go-getter. She’s very action-oriented. And I think that, because we started at the same time, we really made an effort to do a lot of employer outreach to make sure that we had opportunities for our students, not only to come to the Taxation Interview Program and to recruit students, but even earlier than that, to get in front of students and do robust programming. As you mentioned, that’s part of the career symposium. That’s part of the networking events that we have, particularly earlier in the year.

And also to build out our externship program, which has really been key in terms of getting employers engaged with the program, because if we can get them involved as an extern and we can show them how amazing I think our students are, a lot of times, if they have a great experience, they’re willing to come to the program and hire our students, which obviously pays dividends for the program, for our reputation, for placement statistics, and the overall success of the program.

I always say we’re only as successful as student outcomes. So our students need to be getting jobs. But I think a lot of that really is a result of the hard work of our career advisors. I think that they’re just very dedicated and they have a very can-do attitude towards employer outreach.

ALEX POWELL: It’s hard to imagine that there was not the international student population 20 years ago at Georgetown Law because there’s such a strong international presence within the LLM program at large, of course, but also specifically within the tax program.

ELLIS DUNCAN: Yeah, I think it’s been phenomenal to see the international student population grow. And I think that part of that has been opportunities to find employment here in the United States, where I think a lot of that has been driven by the growth of the Big Four into the tax consulting space. And the Big Four in particular just have capabilities that can’t be matched by even the largest global law firms. They have offices around the world. They’re sort of the go-to place for international tax work.

And so they are very interested in hiring foreign lawyers who might have a background in tax in another country who are focusing on international tax. And so it’s been great to see the Big Four in particular willing to hire students who have backgrounds—and just the synergies that happen when they’re able to get one of our great students from another country who has the kind of experience that they need to grow their practice.

ALEX POWELL: Right. And the Graduate Careers Office sends a newsletter every week with employment opportunities and also spotlighting alumni as well. Every week, there are alumni who are spotlighted from around the world, from Latin America, from the Middle East, from Europe, with amazing jobs as well. Dovetailing with that, you’ve visited more than 60 countries, at least. It might be more at this point. How has moving through that many cultures changed the way that you make decisions for a program that pulls students from practically every region on earth?

ELLIS DUNCAN: Good question. I don’t know if I have the best answer because I travel because I just love it. I love experiencing new places, especially if it’s a brand new country. I’ll say this is the—this is not a professional. My favorite thing to do is just wander around a new country, you know, safely, of course, like knowing where I’m going, and to visit grocery stores in new countries. It’s just—I find it just fascinating.

But pulling it back to my work, I don’t know if that necessarily really changes how I view my job. I think it’s always nice to be able to connect with somebody from another country who is a student here or a prospective student. And if you’ve been there and you sort of have a little bit of a—like, you have some background on where they’re from and maybe you can connect on something that’s very interesting about their country, something that you’ve experienced that they might experience as well. It could be something as small as, you know, typical cuisine, something along those lines.

The other thing I’ll say about traveling—I think that, I mean, I really think that in the United States, we do have our issues here. But I think that life here is very good for a lot of people. And I think keeping that perspective is really, really important. Sometimes we are busy chasing the next thing—like more money, title, partnership, all of these things. And sometimes you can just settle in when you have that experience and say, life is pretty good. Like, what I have is really good.

That’s a little existential, I guess, for the podcast, but maybe it’s just a personal thing for me. I always just realize how lucky we are to live in such a prosperous country and just not to take things for granted.

ALEX POWELL: 2Ls, 3Ls, part-time students, law students in general who want to learn more about Georgetown Law’s graduate tax program—where should they look? Who should they contact? Where’s the best place for them to learn more?

ELLIS DUNCAN: I mean, I try to make myself as available as I can to prospective students. And so I’m not going to say that I’m the person to talk to, but please reach out to me. If you’re interested in learning more—even, I always just enjoy talking to students who might have the same interest as I have, like they might be interested in a career in tax law. I always appreciate having new people in my network, whether they become students of mine or not. So I do think that I would encourage anyone just to set up a time with me.

And of course, if they end up coming to Georgetown, talk with as many practitioners, alumni of the program as you can. You’ll get a wide array of helpful information that will help guide your career choices. Because there are many career opportunities coming out of this program. And I see it all the time. I think that just making sense of all of the practice specializations and all of the practice settings—it’s decision fatigue. And a lot of times you just need—the more information you can gather, the more you can help clarify your goals. And also you will never know when one of those conversations will change your life and your career.

ALEX POWELL: It’s fantastic advice. Ellis, thank you very much for your time. It was great to talk to you.

ELLIS DUNCAN: Thank you again for talking to me. Good luck with the rest of your semester.