Groups at Lazard

Would love to hear from any of you WSO veterans about your thoughts on M&A groups at Lazad. Does any group have a particularly good reputation/deal flow/culture. Do any groups have a particularly rough culture. Would love to hear your thoughts. I have searched the forum and have found very limited information regarding particular groups.Any information you could share would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 
Best Response

Industrials and FIG are kind of brutal in terms of hours. Richard Shaw is an MD on industrials in London, and he just doesn't understand the concept of sleep or personal time. They just chose to pool analysts this year, though, so you're not going to be assigned to a specific industry right off the bat. Instead, you're going to be a generalist, and staffed on projects by a specific director.

TMT is pretty cool--maybe the best team. They had some deadweight in middle management, but they recently cut a few people, so they are gone. The real estate team is pretty laid back too, and is run by William Rucker in London. They've had several deals over the last year, and they staff people well (they don't really do trading comps, which is fantastic). Natural Resources is a new amalgem of the old Oil & Gas (which became Power & Energy) and Chemical teams, so they do a lot of seemingly random work.

I don't think much of Capital Markets there, and restructuring is, well, restructuring, so if you want to get into that, go for it.

 

I don't know too much about the New York office. As a whole, the firm is pretty solid across the board. You (clearly) want to work on a team that has good deal flow. A team like Industrials works quite hard in London, but the analysts don't really do any more work than the seniors, and there is something respectable about 'leading by example.' Also, if this is for a summer analyst position, you don't just want to sit around all summer, so working on a team like FIG or Industrials can be excellent exposure.

Like I said, though, you're going to be in a pool, and are going to be staffed from on-high. If you're lucky enough to choose a team to work with, choose the sector in which you're most interested, not by the one some guy on a forum said was good or bad.

 

Stay away from Restructuring. Half of the problem is the restructuring business itself: it is literally the IB equivalent of digging through the trash. Don't get me wrong, you find fees in the trash bucket of restructuring, but problem is that the guys in that field have a general bad odor. Guys from lower tier schools. Guys who just don't look, or act, like top tier bankers. Lazard has to be the best of the junk haulers in restructuring, but one look at their group head says it all - Barry Ridings is, in short, a man of few virtues (certainly not the intellectual kind). He graduated from the bottom of the business school barrel, Cornell's Johnson School (even today it's crap, after decades of efforts by Cornell to upgrade it - can you imagine where the admissions bar was like in the 1970s for that school, when he graduated? Barry Ridings does everything he can, and I mean everything, to push that school into the realm of respectability. Keep pushing, buddy). Ridings sits in a sad, dirty, messy office - 30 minutes of conversation with this guy and he reveals himself to be a petty, always-mad-at-the-prep-school-crowd type of guy. It's amazing to me that someone like that can be so ridiculously pathetic and obvious. Guess these guys are garbagemen and they know it too. Don't be fooled by the current market, when restructuring is "hot" - it hasn't been hot for the last 5 decades.

 
boredbanker:
Stay away from Restructuring. Half of the problem is the restructuring business itself: it is literally the IB equivalent of digging through the trash. Don't get me wrong, you find fees in the trash bucket of restructuring, but problem is that the guys in that field have a general bad odor. Guys from lower tier schools. Guys who just don't look, or act, like top tier bankers. Lazard has to be the best of the junk haulers in restructuring, but one look at their group head says it all - Barry Ridings is, in short, a man of few virtues (certainly not the intellectual kind). He graduated from the bottom of the business school barrel, Cornell's Johnson School (even today it's crap, after decades of efforts by Cornell to upgrade it - can you imagine where the admissions bar was like in the 1970s for that school, when he graduated? Barry Ridings does everything he can, and I mean everything, to push that school into the realm of respectability. Keep pushing, buddy). Ridings sits in a sad, dirty, messy office - 30 minutes of conversation with this guy and he reveals himself to be a petty, always-mad-at-the-prep-school-crowd type of guy. It's amazing to me that someone like that can be so ridiculously pathetic and obvious. Guess these guys are garbagemen and they know it too. Don't be fooled by the current market, when restructuring is "hot" - it hasn't been hot for the last 5 decades.

Hahaha you got it man....

 
boredbanker:
Stay away from Restructuring. Half of the problem is the restructuring business itself: it is literally the IB equivalent of digging through the trash. Don't get me wrong, you find fees in the trash bucket of restructuring, but problem is that the guys in that field have a general bad odor. Guys from lower tier schools. Guys who just don't look, or act, like top tier bankers. Lazard has to be the best of the junk haulers in restructuring, but one look at their group head says it all - Barry Ridings is, in short, a man of few virtues (certainly not the intellectual kind). He graduated from the bottom of the business school barrel, Cornell's Johnson School (even today it's crap, after decades of efforts by Cornell to upgrade it - can you imagine where the admissions bar was like in the 1970s for that school, when he graduated? Barry Ridings does everything he can, and I mean everything, to push that school into the realm of respectability. Keep pushing, buddy). Ridings sits in a sad, dirty, messy office - 30 minutes of conversation with this guy and he reveals himself to be a petty, always-mad-at-the-prep-school-crowd type of guy. It's amazing to me that someone like that can be so ridiculously pathetic and obvious. Guess these guys are garbagemen and they know it too. Don't be fooled by the current market, when restructuring is "hot" - it hasn't been hot for the last 5 decades.

Damn !

 
boredbanker:
Stay away from Restructuring. Half of the problem is the restructuring business itself: it is literally the IB equivalent of digging through the trash. Don't get me wrong, you find fees in the trash bucket of restructuring, but problem is that the guys in that field have a general bad odor. Guys from lower tier schools. Guys who just don't look, or act, like top tier bankers. Lazard has to be the best of the junk haulers in restructuring, but one look at their group head says it all - Barry Ridings is, in short, a man of few virtues (certainly not the intellectual kind). He graduated from the bottom of the business school barrel, Cornell's Johnson School (even today it's crap, after decades of efforts by Cornell to upgrade it - can you imagine where the admissions bar was like in the 1970s for that school, when he graduated? Barry Ridings does everything he can, and I mean everything, to push that school into the realm of respectability. Keep pushing, buddy). Ridings sits in a sad, dirty, messy office - 30 minutes of conversation with this guy and he reveals himself to be a petty, always-mad-at-the-prep-school-crowd type of guy. It's amazing to me that someone like that can be so ridiculously pathetic and obvious. Guess these guys are garbagemen and they know it too. Don't be fooled by the current market, when restructuring is "hot" - it hasn't been hot for the last 5 decades.

Sounds like a prep-school guy (probably sitting at Citi right now or something) that went to H/Y/P and is mad that someone from Cornell (Oh no! Not Cornell!) is Vice Chairman at Lazard.

 

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