Kaitlyn Larroux did not map out a legal career in high school.
She graduated in 2009 and chose accounting as her undergrad because it was practical and came with a scholarship to The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
She returned to Memphis after graduating college and joined a small startup as an accountant.
Because it was a small company, she took on extra responsibilities, including working with the company’s general counsel on contract management. That was the first time she saw how her business background could translate to legal work.
“It was frustrating because I knew I had the answer right; I just didn’t have the authority to sign off on it,” she said. “I knew I could do it.”
That experience motivated her to take the LSAT and determine whether law school was a realistic option.
On the job front, she transitioned from a small business to one of the world’s largest companies, FedEx headquarters. There, she realized the pace of advancement in a large organization was slower than she wanted.
Switching lanes
She already had an LSAT score she felt good about, so on the final day The University of Memphis – Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law was accepting applications, she emailed admissions, submitted everything, received her acceptance and resigned from FedEx — all on the same day.
“It was spur of the moment, but one of the best decisions I’ve ever made,” she said.
Law school is where tax became the lane. Like many students pursuing a business focus at Memphis Law, Larroux enrolled in a basic income tax course. The material did not intimidate her; she had already encountered many of the concepts in her accounting role.
“I enjoyed it,” she said. “I understand these concepts. They felt very familiar.”
She enrolled in the Memphis Law course that prepares students for the ABA Law Student Tax Challenge, where students write a memo and client letter on a hypothetical and, if selected, argue it at the ABA tax meeting.
It had been about 10 years since Memphis Law had been picked for this challenge. Larroux’s team was called over winter break and invited to present in New Orleans. That trip turned tax from an interest into a plan.
Larroux applied to top tax LL.M. programs and chose New York University School of Law. The reasons were straightforward: it was a top tax program; she already knew New York from a prior summer internship; and she had family nearby who could make an expensive and intense year more manageable.
Do the hard thing
She also had a philosophy about graduate school that she now repeats to her own students.
“If you are paying someone to teach you something, you should pick the hardest possible thing that you think you can do,” she said. “It doesn’t really make sense to pay someone to teach you something that is easy.”
By the time she finished at NYU Law, passed the bar and entered practice in 2020, Larroux had a set of skills that fit large-firm transactional tax.
Today, Larroux is a senior associate in the Tax Group at Baker Donelson in Memphis. Her work is broad, but it is not scattered. It is organized into three clear categories that match what the Memphis market needs and what her training allows her to do.
“My practice is threefold,” she said. “One part is corporate work. One part is estate planning and then one part is non-profits.”
On the corporate side, she works with privately held businesses rather than public companies. A typical week might include drafting or revising partnership or operating agreements, adding tax provisions, reviewing compensation arrangements or assisting on a purchase or sale.
Because she has the LL.M., she does not just spot the tax sections for someone else to fix it, she can write them. That makes her useful on matters where the client wants a single lawyer to keep the documents consistent.
The estate-planning part of her practice is tied to the same tax knowledge. Baker Donelson’s Memphis office handles both routine and more complex estate work. For clients whose estates may be taxable, Larroux helps structure gifts, trusts and other planning tools to reduce that tax.
For clients with smaller estates, she drafts wills, powers of attorney and similar documents and can also assist with probate after someone dies. The LL.M. training lets her move comfortably between those levels of complexity.
The nonprofit work relies on tax even more directly. Exempt organizations still must follow IRS rules, and transactions among nonprofits require attention to restrictions that do not exist in ordinary corporate deals.
Larroux forms 501(c)(3) entities, advises them on ongoing compliance and works on nonprofit mergers, including in health care. Here the advantage of a tax background is obvious: the rules for organizations that do not pay tax are in the tax code.
Clients rarely know all of the tax nuances. They come in with a problem and with varying levels of concern.
“People are afraid of the IRS,” she said. “Being able to explain what’s going on and help them figure out how to fix it is a huge impact.”
She is now at the experience level where her day is split. A significant portion is still research, drafting and reviewing agreements for other lawyers in the firm. Another portion is client-facing: taking calls, answering follow-up questions and beginning to develop her own relationships.
Larroux said that shift matters because once you know the person behind the file, the long research memorandum or the careful redline is easier to complete.
“There’s a point where your client comes to you with an issue, and they don’t even know what their options are,” she said. “Being able to break it down so they can make an educated decision is the most rewarding part.”
Never stop learning
Teaching is the other component of her current role, and it directly connects to her path through Memphis Law.
When the tax professor who had guided her retired, Larroux told the school she was interested in keeping partnership tax alive for students. Memphis Law invited her to teach it as an adjunct. She took it because she did not want the next class to lose access to the course and the tax challenge pipeline that helped her reach NYU Law.
“Teaching a law school class is way harder than taking the class,” she said. “You have to know everything and be ready to answer questions.”
Preparing to teach one of the most technical courses in the curriculum keeps her sharp for client work. It also allows her to offer the kind of advice she wishes more students would hear earlier.
She tells students to build attention-to-detail habits now, to get a second set of eyes on their work and to understand that they will not walk into a firm as experts. Tax practice, in her view, rewards people who can learn, organize and explain.
That is also why she spends time talking through LL.M. decisions with students. She tells them to weigh cost, geography and job prospects, not just prestige.
For someone planning to practice in a smaller market, a top LL.M. may still be worth it but only if the lawyer plans to make full use of the specialization. For someone with a tax job already lined up, the value calculation may be different.
Larroux said she was surprised after law school that the degree and the bar exam do not end the education cycle.
“Learning never stops,” she said. “You are not done learning when you get your degree, you’re not done learning when you pass the bar. You will keep learning from day one as an associate, and you will never stop learning.”
