Jeff Koonce was chosen to the list of Forty Under 40 winners without much room to spare—he turns 40 on Nov. 20, two days after the deadline. “I guess the person who submitted the nomination figured out how close I was to the cutoff,” Koonce says. “It’s a good 40th birthday present.”
While Koonce is a tax attorney who has earned professional honors, he has a side career as an adjunct professor at LSU’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center, where he teaches federal income tax law. Koonce got into teaching after he was in a severe car accident about five years ago. The wreck caused him to reassess his priorities.
“It was kind of a come-to-Jesus moment,” he says. “I started thinking about what was really important to me and a way for me to give back.”
Balancing his duties at Phelps Dunbar, at the law school and with his family have led Koonce to make sacrifices—such as not sleeping in on the weekend. “I do all of my work for my class between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Saturday,” he says.
For Koonce, teaching is his way of thanking the LSU professors that inspired him. “There are some very bright minds at the law center,” he says. “I want to do something to help them focus in the right direction.”
Before Koonce entered law school, he drifted across several fields of study. He started out as a trombone performance major, playing keyboards and singing for SRO, a Top 40 band that played in local clubs in the early 1990s. But Koonce says he never had any interest in being a professional musician and he shifted his studies over to accounting. “I kind of meandered around,” Koonce says. “I didn’t want to practice public accounting.” His father, a retired CPA, suggested that Koonce go to law school.
After taking a course on tax law, Koonce says he found his calling. He even found the class to be “a lot of fun,” which is something you don’t hear every day about tax law. “Tax law is boring in the abstract,” he says, “but when it’s your money, it’s real important.”
Age: 39
What was your first job?
“It’s not very glamorous. I was a janitor in New Orleans raising money to buy my first car.”
Click here for the complete list of 2008's Forty Under 40 winners.
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