Because of the older nature of the employees who also may have families to raise, there tends to be less focus on bonding and socializing out of the office and more of a culture of getting home asap after work. There is also somewhat generation gap between Directors and Associates who work very closely on the same team. In contrast to Big Four firms where the MDs and Senior Managers hardly interact with the Associates, AlixPartners has small teams where all members of the team from young to experienced work hand in hand. This generation gap also shifts the culture dynamics within a team as certain traits of a younger group may not be compatible with the ways of an older age group. Also, there may be more stereotyping of what a younger generation is or is not capable of. When being managed by people closer in age, they are able to judge abilities more accurately since the supervisor was would have been in the same shoes not too long ago.
For people who join in the middle of the year, there is not much guidance or hand holding through the onboarding process. There is a 2-3 day orientation that gets you set up, but career growth, professional development, and finding engagements is all up to you after that. The buddy/mentor system is very fragile and not always set up properly. Therefore, employees need to take much more initiative to reach out to others and find out how the firm operates.
The work tends to revolve around restructuring/bankruptcy most of the time, since that's what the reputation of the firm is in. Sometimes there are other types of projects, but these are the ones that get most of the attention and larger staffed teams. All practices of the firm (FAS, EMS, IMS, and TRS) could be involved in a single client. Sometimes the work is interesting, but at the lower levels, it could be just tedious and mundane. Since it also takes a while to be promoted in this firm, people who are quite senior could also be doing tedious or mundane tasks -- for example, it's not uncommon for Directors to be creating and editing Powerpoints or drafting up financial models. The firm also relies heavily on paper documentation and binders, which seems a bit old-fashioned. However, in working with law firms and bankruptcy courts, I guess this may be a necessary evil.
