I am a professor of law at Vanderbilt University School of Law. My current teaching areas are Accounting, Comparative Law, and Professional Responsibility. I am writing a law review article on One-Stop Shopping for Legal and Accounting Services. I am an attorney and a Certified Public Accountant, and have practiced each profession. Some members practice primarily as CPAs, others as attorneys, and others as dual practitioners.
Some members practice in related fields, such as financial planning.
All members are keenly aware that we are governed by three sets of standards. First, as attorneys, we are governed by the standards of professional conduct promulgated by state supreme courts, supplemented by federal court standards and, in some jurisdictions, by state statutes. Second, as CPAs, we are governed by state statutes on the practice of accountancy, supplemented by the rules of state boards of accountancy. And, third, some of the state standards for each profession are superseded by federal law, including Acts of Congress, rules of agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the decisions of the courts. As attorney-CPAs, we have had to learn how to accommodate the sometimes inconsistent demands of these three sets of standards.