Why Work With an Attorney Who Is Also a CPA?
Most people have worked with an attorney at some point. Many have worked with a CPA. Very few have worked with someone who is both — and most people don’t know what they are missing when they haven’t.
The combination of legal and accounting credentials is rare for a reason: both disciplines are demanding on their own, and maintaining active licensure in both requires continuing education, ethical obligations, and practical experience across two professional bodies. There are fewer attorney-CPAs in practice than there are attorney-MDs. But in the areas where legal and financial decisions are inseparable — estate planning, business succession, real estate investment, and tax strategy — the dual credential changes the quality of the advice you receive in ways that matter.
The Problem With the Referral Model
The conventional approach to legal and financial planning involves a team: your attorney handles the documents, your CPA handles the taxes, and your financial advisor handles the investments. Each does their job, and in the best case, they communicate regularly. In practice, this model has significant gaps.
An attorney who drafts a revocable living trust may not fully model the income tax consequences of how it is funded. A CPA who recommends a Roth conversion may not consider how it interacts with the client’s estate plan or changes the optimal trust structure. A financial advisor who recommends a particular asset allocation may not understand the gift tax implications of transferring those assets to the next generation.
Each advisor is doing their job competently within their lane. But no one is looking at the whole picture at once — because doing so requires both sets of credentials at the same time.
Where the Integration Produces Real Results
Estate Planning
Estate planning is fundamentally a tax-driven exercise. The choice between a revocable and irrevocable trust, the decision to use annual gifting strategies, the structure of a family limited partnership, and the timing of charitable gifts all have legal form and tax consequences that must be analyzed together. An attorney-CPA can identify the optimal structure and draft the documents that implement it — without a handoff, without miscommunication, and without the gaps that open up when two professionals are each managing half of the picture. For Illinois residents, the interaction between the federal estate tax exemption (currently $15 million per individual, following the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) and the Illinois estate tax threshold ($4 million) requires integrated planning that a single-discipline advisor routinely misses.
Business Transactions
When a business owner sells their company, the legal structure of the transaction — asset sale vs. stock sale, earnout structure, installment note terms — directly determines the tax outcome. The difference in after-tax proceeds between a well-structured and a poorly-structured transaction can be hundreds of thousands of dollars on even a modest transaction. An attorney-CPA analyzes both the legal and tax dimensions of the deal simultaneously, models the after-tax economics of competing structures before negotiating, and documents the transaction with both dimensions in mind.
Real Estate
Real estate decisions — how to hold title, whether to use an LLC or a land trust, whether to execute a 1031 exchange, how to integrate a rental property into an estate plan — require both legal documentation and tax analysis. The attorney handles the title and documents. The CPA handles the depreciation, basis, and capital gains analysis. When those are the same person, the transaction is more efficient, the advice is more coherent, and the client avoids the cost of coordinating between two advisors who each see only part of the transaction.
Tax Disputes
When the IRS proposes additional tax or initiates a collection action, the ideal advisor is one who can read the tax code and the regulations with legal precision, understand how the IRS applies them in practice from a CPA’s perspective, and represent the taxpayer through the examination, appeals, and if necessary, Tax Court processes. An attorney-CPA does all of this. A CPA alone cannot represent a taxpayer in Tax Court. An attorney without accounting depth may not understand the financial substance of what the IRS is challenging.
What the Credentials Mean in Practice
Paul Lechner holds a Juris Doctor and a Master of Laws in Taxation (LL.M.) from DePaul University, and is a licensed Certified Public Accountant. He is a past President of the Illinois Chapter of the Financial Planning Association, has taught estate planning and forensic accounting at Saint Xavier University and Governors State University, and has served in senior financial roles at KPMG LLP, GE Capital, CIT, Trinity Industries, and other organizations where large, complex transactions were the daily work.
The LL.M. in Taxation is a graduate law degree focused entirely on the Internal Revenue Code, tax regulations, and case law. Fewer than five percent of attorneys hold one. Combined with active CPA licensure and decades of transactional experience, it represents a depth of tax legal expertise that is genuinely uncommon in solo and small-firm practice.
What This Means for You
If you are a business owner, a real estate investor, a high-income professional, or a family planning for the transfer of wealth to the next generation, you need both legal documents and tax analysis — and you need them to work together. The question is whether you get that integration from one advisor who holds both credentials, or by hiring two advisors and hoping they coordinate effectively.
Being proactive is the best way. Some say the future cannot be predicted — the only way to predict your future is to create it. Working with an advisor who sees both the legal and financial dimensions at the same time is one of the most concrete ways to protect that future.