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Law practice income breaks most of the assumptions general tax advice is built on. It arrives unevenly, flows through partnerships and professional corporations, and sits inside the least favourable category the code has for high-earning professionals.
Who it is for. Solo practitioners, partners and of-counsel at small and mid-sized firms, and plaintiff-side attorneys with contingency income.
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What the guide actually covers, section by section.
Solo practitioners, partners and of-counsel at small and mid-sized firms, and plaintiff-side attorneys with contingency income, especially in California. Associates with only W-2 income will find the planning sections shorter but the filing checklist still useful.
Entity choice is the biggest single lever, and for California attorneys it comes with a constraint most online guides miss: you cannot practice law through an LLC. The guide lays out the menu that is actually available and why the math needs re-running as the practice grows.
The W-2 disappears, and with it the withholding that quietly handled everything. What replaces it - estimated payments, self-employment tax, and the planning that has to start the year you make partner rather than the April after.
Plaintiff-side practice concentrates years of work into single settlement events, and the tax code taxes income in the year it arrives. A fee that took four years to earn can land at the top marginal rates, state and federal together. The planning options are real, and almost all of them have to be set up before the settlement.
Law is a specified service trade or business, so the federal pass-through deduction phases out for attorneys above income thresholds that other business owners keep. California does not follow the federal deduction at all, but its pass-through entity election can restore federal deductions for state tax paid - with strict payment deadlines.
For most high-earning attorneys, retirement plan design is the largest deduction available and the most underused, from a solo 401(k) to cash balance plans. Then the deductions attorneys commonly miss, and where sloppy trust accounting quietly bleeds into the tax return. The guide closes with a filing checklist built for a practice.
All free, all written by our team.
Nine strategy areas that decide whether you overpay, the California layer most online advice gets wrong, and a 12-point self-check.
Get the guideEvery document to gather before filing season, the deductions rushed returns miss, and a timeline that ends without April surprises.
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