Be fully aware of what you are getting yourself into
Pros
As an associate/senior associate, you are exposed to clients from many different industries, which adds a lot of variety to your work and keeps things interesting. There is always an initial period of getting up to speed with that industry, your client's place in that industry, competitors, etc., which is always very satisfying. There are chances to work on some very big and interesting cases, from which you will learn a lot. You will be working along very smart colleagues, for very big-name clients. In my experience, work-life balance wasn't so bad. Sure, we had very late nights around deadlines, but we also had weeks where there was very little work. You will be doing a lot of research. For those looking for a more academic environment, BRG provides a good mix of academia + private industry. The firm has access to sources such as JSTOR, Lexis Nexus, Thomson One, Bloomberg, and a great internal librarian who can help find 90% of the academic articles you're looking for. You will have the opportunity to form relationships with smart people (and I'm not only talking about the Ph.Ds). If you want to go to graduate school, these same smart people can be very strong references, as many are professors themselves. If you want to stay in economic consulting for a while, the company promotes largely based on merit, so if you work hard, I'm sure you can move up the ranks quickly. There are some very outstanding managers who do have your best interests in mind and will offer you guidance along the way. The real pro at BRG is that expressing interest in the right cases and a bit of luck will give you the opportunity to develop very strong technical skills. The more senior consultants do a very good job of putting you in the habit of making your work efficient and scalable. You will know Excel and SAS very well, and there are opportunities to learn Stata, R, and SQL (although this is very dependent on which type of case you work on... see Cons below). These will be very marketable skills for when you decide to leave economic consulting. In short, BRG will give you all of the building blocks, but with minimal instructions. But if you're truly ambitious and resourceful, and know exactly what you want from economic consulting, you can have a rewarding experience at BRG. You will also become very good at meeting client demands on short notices, because that will be a large part of your experience. Hopefully you're a patient person.
Cons
The biggest BRG-specific con I can think of is that the company pays below the market rate. This might be due to the fact that the company is only a few years old. As the company continues to grow, I hope compensation does too, or there will be a serious problem with retaining top talent. At least if you put in the time, you can receive a large bonus. To be fair, the rest of the cons listed here apply to the entire industry as well, and they're just things you should know before entering this industry. Lawyers. There is a dysfunctional love triangle between your team, the client, and the lawyer(s) representing the client. Lawyers love to wait until the last minute to tell you they want major changes made to the workproduct, they know no boundaries when it comes to communication (emails are sent throughout the night, and a lawyer once started calling our cell phones after hours), and they tend to make a big deal out of (what can seem like) the tiniest details. Despite this being a fast-paced environment where things get done, the lawyers can make economic consulting feel like a very, very slow and inefficient environment. You will need to be very detail-oriented and your work must be absolutely error-free, which can add a lot of stress. On the plus side, this is a good way of developing your client-relationship skills - know how to manage expectations, and make your work efficient to the point that last-minute updates don't set you back, and you'll be fine. Despite the firm promising the opportunity to work across many different practice areas, the reality is that the variety of your projects often depends on the director who is serving as the expert for said project. Experts focus on only a handful of practice areas, so don't expect to be able to jump between the many practice areas so easily. During interviews, be sure to ask your interviewers what kinds of cases they've worked on recently, and look at the expert's C.V. to get a feel for what type of work you can expect. Without a doubt, you will also run into some very bad managers, many with the same cons as the lawyers, but with the added negative of micro-managing you. There will be many short and stressful deadlines which can result in burning out. No matter how complex your analysis is, no matter how many hours you've spent in search of the perfect academic literature to support your argument, no matter how many hours you've put into double-checking every iteration of your team's report to make sure its 100% error-free, at the end of the day, the lawyers have the final say. Your analysis is nothing more than a bargaining point used for litigation. If you wanted to save the world or make a large impact, I don't recommend this industry. (These are cons that occur because 75% of your cases involve litigation. If you're lucky, you may come across the traditional business consulting projects)
