Every year, Clinical Professor Caleb Smith lets his students know about an ongoing volunteer opportunity with a nonprofit organization called Prepare + Prosper, which helps qualified low-income people prepare their income taxes free of charge. 

Usually, one or two students respond. This year, however, eight students answered the call to help. 

“I was just shocked,” says Smith, who put out the word in the Federal Tax Clinic that he directs as well as in his tax procedure class. “I don’t spend much time on it all, other than just to let people know that it exists and that it’s a great organization. I said, ‘If you’re interested, let me know.’ And just so many hands went up. It was amazing.” 

Volunteering for Prepare + Prosper requires a serious time commitment — a four-hour shift per week January through the April 15 tax deadline — at one of the busiest times for law students. 

Smith says he has detected a growing interest among his students around what he terms “the confluence of tax and public interest.” But he says he can’t put his finger on why student interest in Prepare + Prosper is so high this year. 

While a broad explanation may remain unclear, three of the current Prepare + Prosper volunteers from Minnesota Law discussed their own reasons for stepping up. 

Providing a service with practical benefits 

Caroline Rice ’24 and Mohammad Ziny ’24 have law firm jobs lined up after they graduate this spring, so they are not volunteering to strengthen their resumes for prospective employers. Rather, both indicate that they are volunteering out of a sense of public-mindedness, while acknowledging that there are practical reasons that might benefit them as they begin their legal careers. 

Rice, who will be joining an estate planning practice with a Minneapolis firm, recalled a conversation she had with U.S. Tax Court Judge Ronald L. Buch when the tax court came to town last year. The subject of preparing tax returns for low-income people came up. 

“I asked, ‘How can I leverage this on my resume? I’m not going to be doing income tax prep except for myself,’” says Rice. “And he just said there’s just a logic that underpins the entire tax system, and the more familiar you are with how the statutes are set up, how they’re connected and how they apply to forms, and how the procedure works, it’s going to be valuable no matter what kind of tax you do.” 

Ziny, who will be practicing in the transactional tax area with a firm in New York, agrees with Rice. “The experience of working with the tax code is always going to help you even if you work in completely different sections,” he says. 

Cade Geldreich ’25, who is looking forward to a summer internship with a Chicago law firm and ultimately a career in tax law, believes that the volunteering experience is valuable because tax law is “a lingo-driven industry and you have to be able to speak the lingo.” While the scales of an earned-income tax credit and a multi-million-dollar corporate R&D tax credit are different, he says their mechanics are similar. “Just being able to communicate those words and understand what they mean in different contexts is valuable to learn.” 

Motivated to help 

Still, as Smith suspects, a primary motivator for the students really does appear to be a more selfless public-mindedness. 

As Ziny says, “I think people in law school sometimes think you have to pick between helping people and working for corporate law firms. But I think this is a great way to bolster your skill set in the real world and still be of service, helping people from all walks of life.” 

Smith, meanwhile, thinks the attraction of being a volunteer tax preparer might be as simple as that it offers a break from the law school routine. 

“Law school can be kind of alienating,” he says. “You’re sitting in a room listening to a professor or you’re reading a ton of cases. You don’t always get a lot of direct experience working with people that you want to help, and a lot of people come to Minnesota Law because helping people is what they want to do. I don’t think they’re doing it so much for professional reasons. I think they’re doing it to feel engaged.”