Posted by Authored by Nick Tiniakos
I didn’t come to law school the traditional way. There was no gap year spent “finding myself” before the LSAT, no undergrad-to-law-school pipeline. I’ve spent the last 11 years working full time at the Cook County Treasurer’s Office while going to law school at UIC — full days at the office, followed by evenings in a classroom, followed by nights with a casebook I was usually too tired to fully appreciate.
People sometimes ask why I didn’t just quit and go full time. The honest answer is that I couldn’t afford to. But the more interesting answer is that I didn’t want to — because by the time I sat down in my first tax class, I had already been living the material for a decade.
Property Tax Isn’t an Abstraction When You’ve Processed It
Most law students meet property tax law as a unit in a Property or Tax course — a set of rules to memorize, a hypothetical to apply them to, and then it’s on to the next topic. I met it as a job. Long before I could tell you what an exemption “is” in black-letter terms, I had watched, in real time, what happens when a homeowner exemption is missed after someone dies, or when an estate doesn’t realize a senior exemption needs to be re-filed after a property transfer. These aren’t hypotheticals to me. They’re Tuesday.
That turned out to be a strange advantage in the classroom. When a professor raises an issue about how tax liability follows property through a transfer, or how deadlines can quietly determine outcomes, I’m not trying to picture it — I’ve watched the fallout when people miss it. I think that’s part of why I’ve gravitated so hard toward tax law and trusts and estates as a specialty. It’s not an intellectual preference so much as a recognition that this is the area where my two full-time lives — the job and the degree — actually talk to each other.
Working Full Time Teaches You What Casebooks Can’t
There’s a version of this essay that’s just about time management — how you learn to read cases on a lunch break, or how evening classes force a kind of discipline you don’t get if school is your only job. That’s all true, but it’s not really the point.
The bigger lesson has been about what the law looks like when it’s being administered rather than argued. Litigators and professors talk about rules; the people running a county office have to make thousands of those rules work, on time, for people who often have no idea the rules exist. Being on that side of the counter for over a decade means I don’t just think about what the law says — I think about how it actually lands on someone standing in a lobby with a folder of paperwork and a deadline they didn’t know about.
I don’t think that instinct is something you can get from a syllabus. And I suspect it’s part of why, when I eventually get to practice tax and estates law, I won’t be new to the parts of the job that surprise people who came up strictly on the academic path — the deadlines, the forms, the human confusion that sits underneath every technical rule.
A Word for the People Who Didn’t Know They Were Teaching Me
None of this happens without two people who probably have no idea how much they shaped me: my boss, Maria Pappas, and my director, Paul. I started at the Treasurer’s Office as an intern, watching them be the last ones out of the building more nights than I can count. I didn’t fully understand what I was absorbing at the time — I just knew I wanted to work like that, to care like that. Somewhere between then and now, “watching them” turned into “trying to lead like they do,” and I don’t think I’d be the person — or the almost-lawyer — writing this essay without them. They’ve never asked for credit, so I’m giving it to them here instead: they made me believe that anything is possible, and that belief is the quiet engine behind every long night of casebooks that followed.
Eleven years in, with a law degree finally on the horizon, I don’t think of the two as separate chapters of my life. They’ve been running at the same time, and honestly, the county job made me a better law student before I ever knew it was doing it
About the Author
Nick Tiniakos is a JD Candidate at UIC Law with 11 years of experience at the Cook County Treasurer’s Office. He serves as Vice Chair of the Chicago Bar Association’s Securities Law Subcommittee and Program Coordinator for its Young Lawyers Section, and previously served as President of UIC Law’s Tax and Securities Organization. He plans to specialize in tax law and trusts and estates.