William D. Briggs, CPA

William D. Briggs is a CPA and tax advisor with 40 years of practice preparing returns and advising the individuals, families and business owners of Lake County and Chicago’s North Shore. To the people he works with, he is an advisor and friend as much as an accountant, the one they call before they make a decision, not just the one who files the return afterward.

He came up the serious way. Bill Briggs started his career on the partner track at one of the largest public accounting firms, spent a few years in corporate finance and then struck out on his own. The practice has been in Lake Forest, then for fifteen years in Lake Bluff and now Lake Forest again. It’s the kind of path that leaves a person with real range: he has seen how the largest firms operate, how corporate finance thinks and what it takes to run his own shop.

His training runs deep. Bill Briggs studied at Duke University, earned his Master of Management at Northwestern’s Kellogg School and holds his CPA certificate from the University of Illinois. Earlier work in forensic accounting taught him to look past the numbers on a page and see what they’re really telling you, and that way of thinking still shapes how he reads a return today.

What his clients tend to say about him is simpler than any of that: they trust him. They call before they act, not only after: before options are exercised, before a property changes hands, before a business is sold. A sound decision made early is worth more than a tidy return filed too late. Many of the families he works with have been with him for decades.

Bill resided in the Lake Forest area for more than 25 years. He is a year‑round Chicago sports fan, with twenty‑six years of Blackhawks season tickets and twenty of White Sox (which just about covers the calendar), and his faith has long been anchored at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. And over the years, he has always made time to give back to the community around him, including the local United Way.