Compass Lexecon Reviews

Pros

Culture is great Work hours are flexible Senior employees give you the time of day to explain concepts and to properly brief you

Cons

Working hours can be erratic, but it is the same across the industry. Cases can drag on much longer than expected

Pros

Work with smart people; build transferrable skills.

Cons

Very, very long hours for months on end without adequate compensation for over-time. Poor development opportunities, though this depends on the office.

Pros

Great atmosphere, very collaborative, lots of involvement with senior management, lots of contact with colleagues at other European offices, co-location with parent company makes it feel like a bigger company, semi transparent leadership team.

Cons

team can work very very long hours and can get very stressful, sometimes at the expenses of praise for hard work and feeling valued. stressful atmosphere sometimes means that people can become unresponsive and over focused. Management need to take more care of HR procedures and work with HR to uphold them. HR procedures not always upheld and followed.

Advice to Management

More transparency, more praise, follow HR procedures, better communication

Pros

Great variety with industries, projects. Exposure is fantastic because you are always working closely with the senior management. Secondments between European offices are very common.

Cons

Small company atmosphere can sometimes get in the way of simple things. Firm focuses only on competition (this applies to CL Europe only).

Advice to Management

Establish processes as the firm grows (which it is doing very fast).

Pros

Compass offers analysts very good experience especially for coming right out of college. Your Excel and coding skills will improve dramatically and overall you will gain a lot of data management and research skills that will you serve you well. Compass is a VERY generous company in terms of benefits. The base pay is very high and you are almost sure to get paid a lot in overtime. Additionally, you get more PTO than most...

Cons

I wish I had known the extent of the "demanding hours" everyone warns you about. 60-70 hour weeks are not uncommon. I had many 16-18 hour days. Management will sometimes ask you for all of your weekend plans months in advance in anticipation of an upcoming deadline. During the last few months I worked there, we were required to come in to the office and work all day Saturday and Sunday for an entire month. Even on normal...

Advice to Management

The hours seem to be a problem with the industry overall and not Compass Lexecon specifically. Maybe just communicate with members of the team what needs to get done that night and absolutely cannot wait until tomorrow and stay true to that and let analysts go when that task is completed.

Pros

Culture is great. Everyone is treated as a family.

Cons

There might be some office politics involved, specially on identifying who gets promoted.

Pros

Work with very smart people. Lots of variability of cases and industries.

Cons

Senior management could communicate better. Work life balance is a serious issue. Work can get tedious and repetitive at Analyst level. No clear path to promotion and company is slow to promote.

Pros

Pays well; get to work on leading antitrust cases

Cons

Not much opportunity for staff development