Celebrating Kris Landrum, From the Front Desk to Architect of the Firm’s Foundation
For nearly five decades, Kris Landrum has been an integral part of the very foundation of Tuggle Duggins. She has kept the firm’s books, managed the retirement plan that supports its people and prepared estate tax returns for the families its attorneys serve. She has worked alongside the attorneys whose names are on the door.
Today, Kris retires from full-time work. Her journey is one of the firm’s great stories.
From the Front Desk
Around 1978, with both of her children in school, Kris answered the firm’s ad for a part-time receptionist. In those years the role included posting every attorney’s time entries by hand onto paper time cards.
She stepped away within the same year to be home with her children for the summer, but not long after, the firm asked her to come back and fill in at the front desk.
A Career Built at Night
Around the same time, Kris and a friend, a fellow English major, enrolled in accounting classes at UNC Greensboro at night. Kris is candid about the appeal.
“I think we were interested at first because our husbands would have to take care of the kids at night for a while.”
She took Principles of Accounting I and II, then Tax Accounting. Her professor, an attorney who taught at night, encouraged her to complete enough coursework to sit for the CPA exam. When the attorneys learned she was studying accounting, they moved her into the bookkeeping department, and Bill Tankersley, one of the firm’s tax attorneys, began giving her tax work. She finished her coursework, sat for the exam and passed.
A Firm That Made Room
A starting accountant at a CPA firm could expect to work about 60 hours a week. Kris and her husband had decided early on that she would be the one at home with their children, so that more traditional path did not fit their family.
That is when Jim Duggins offered another one: a five-hour workday, adjusted as her family needed. “And that’s how I started working here and just never left.”
As her children grew, her availability grew with them. Kris went on to supervise the bookkeeping department and manage the firm’s retirement plan. Her husband, who spent more than 30 years as an engineer at IBM, wrote a program the firm used to calculate retirement plan contributions and helped set up its early computers. When the firm later hired Elizabeth Osteen as firm administrator to oversee bookkeeping, Kris was able to focus fully on tax and estate work.
Protecting What Families Have Built
Founding partner Dick Tuggle first brought Kris onto a large estate, and from there, estates became the center of her career. Jim Duggins was her primary mentor through it all. She describes him as “like an honorary big brother.”
On an estate that requires a tax return, Kris works with the attorney, the appraisers and the family to determine what each asset is worth and how the whole estate fits together. Many of those estates include closely held businesses, where valuation questions are common and IRS audits are a real possibility. For years, Kris signed those returns and worked directly with the IRS when questions came.
What she values most is the purpose behind the work. “You’re helping clients protect what they’ve built.”
She also loves the essence of the work itself, which she compares to putting together a puzzle: what affects the tax, how each asset will be valued and where the issues are likely to be. But she is quick to credit the team around her, from Dick Tuggle and Jim Duggins in the early years to Mike Wenig, Brad Jacobs and Erin Bailey today.
“I was never out there on my own.”
It is the kind of collaboration that has always defined Tuggle Duggins: estate planning attorneys, tax attorneys and a CPA working as a team for a family and its business.
Deep Roots in Tax and Accounting
Kris’s career traces one of the firm’s defining strengths. When she joined, roughly half of the firm’s attorneys were also CPAs, and that depth in tax and accounting shaped how the firm served its early clients. The attorney-CPA is far rarer today. As Kris notes, the path she took no longer exists, since CPA licensure now requires far more coursework, often the equivalent of a master’s degree.
A Life Shared With the Firm
“If you work somewhere long enough, just about your whole life takes place while you’re there.”
Kris and her husband both grew up in Burlington. They met in seventh grade and began dating in ninth.
In September 2002, her husband died suddenly of a heart attack while hiking at Hanging Rock. Kris was at work that day. Jim Duggins came to her desk, shared the news and traveled with her. As Kris describes it, the firm was with her through all of it and gave her a sense of purpose in a time of unimaginable grief.
For Kris, over the years, the concept of a “firm family” shifted from figurative to literal. Her daughter, Melanie, worked at the firm’s front desk during college summers and met her husband there. He is the brother of Tim Rains, who has led the firm’s IT for many years. Melanie now works at Atrium Health in Greensboro, and Kris’s son, Jonathan, is an owner of a small architecture firm in Raleigh. Kris is also a proud grandmother to four grandsons.
Asked why she stayed at one firm for her entire career, Kris points to the people. The longer you are somewhere, she says, the more connections you make and friendships you build, and she never found a reason to leave.
What Comes Next
Kris will continue with the firm a day or two each week through this tax season. In June, she will set out on a Viking cruise around the Mediterranean with friends. She plans to spend more time at her place at Kure Beach with her family, visit the mountain home she shares with her brother in Fancy Gap and continue her sailing trips around the world.
“It’s going to be quite the change. I’m going to have to figure it out,” she says with a laugh.
The Last Word
For many years, Kris measured a successful draft by how little blue ink came back from Jim Duggins’s desk. As her longtime mentor and honorary big brother, Jim gets the last word.
“Thank you, Kris, for nearly five decades of dedication to Tuggle Duggins and to the families and businesses we serve. We wish you a wonderful retirement.”