Big 4 vs Boutique vs Economic Consulting

Top tier 2 boutique (OW/LEK/Parthenon/ATK/etc.) would be best. Economic consulting would be very good too, but if you are low on the quant spectrum it would not be a good fit. Big 4 is great to fall back on regardless.

Anybody else has insights on this? I am considering Econ consulting (think litigation consulting) vs Advisory consulting (not management consulting) at Big 4. Both places have not yet made offers but I still wanted to know the career paths, pros and cons of each option. I do have an advanced degree in economics but no prior work experience.

There's so many threads on this website about making the jump from Big 4 to BB. I know some of the most popular answers is to get into TAS (transaction advisory services) or valuations, especially for IB.

I can talk to you about Economic Consulting. By far the most common exit ops are MBA, Law School, or a PhD program. My Econ Consulting firm placed very well in the aforementioned 3 exits (people exiting to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Kellogg, Sloan, other M7 etc.). I personally think the skill set it builds helps to prepare you very well for the GRE/LSAT because everyone coming in already tends to be comfortable with quant, but with the amount of critical reading we did you can't help but place in at least the 90th percentile for verbal on standardized tests. Otherwise people exiting to industry had a wide variety of exits - ranging from front/middle office Finance roles to working as some type of business or risk analyst in industry.

I disagree with the comment above that said you have to be good at quant to work in Econ Consulting. Most people are, but it is not a requirement as many cases are highly qualitative. In my office most analysts preferred quantitative cases, so I'm sure someone that prefers to work on qualitative cases would be appreciated at many firms.

Work life balance varies. You won't work anywhere close to IB hours, you'll likely average somewhere around 50-60 hrs a week (of actual billable work; less sitting around waiting for things to do than in IB) but your hours will be very volatile as the busyness of cases change based on court dates, legal proceedings etc. Some weeks may have you work 35 hours and others may have you working 90 hours.

The culture is more intellectual and introverted than in banking or management consulting. Less talking about partying/drinking/that awesome trip you took and more discussing politics/economic theory/other random topics with coworkers (this assumption is based on what friends in MC/IB tell me their office is like).

Comp is in line with Management Consulting.

General skills you'll build/advantages are: 1. Good excel modeling skills (I personally think Econ Consultants are some of the best, though not the quickest, at excel modelling because our models are often more abstract that those in Finance practices). 2. Crazy strong critical reading skills 3. Knowledge in R, Stata, and VBA/Python depending on what you decide to learn 4. Strong problem solving skills 5. Very academic, so you might actually use some of those theoretical things you learn in school 6. You'll get an inside view to some high profile business cases/scandals

Disadvantages are: 1. Some people think the work is boring (cases often involve a lot of research, reading depositions, reading legal documents etc.) 2. Less defined exit ops than Management Consulting and IB/ER, unless you decide to go back to school

Feel free to pm me if you have any questions.