Bates White LLC Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Bates White LLC full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – -Collegial environment
-Great benefits
-Generous bonus structure
-Opportunity to work in a number of areas
-Access to senior leadership
-Flexible schedule
-Firm-wide community service initiatives

Cons – -Hours can be long
-Can be stressful
-Always multitasking, little downtime
-Always connected
-Slow decisions (upper management)
-Often concede to ridiculous client demands

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Bates White LLC

Pros – Meritocracy, collaborative work environment, lots of back-end support on the admin/IT side; excellent chance for exposure to clients. Collegial environment although people sometimes tend to get holed up in their offices without interacting. Not a whole lot of travel required so no problem with endless hours in the airport or in flight.

Cons – Erratic hours, engagements are sometimes long and interminable.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep fine tuning work-life-balance.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Bates White LLC

Pros – The people-- smart, talented, hardworking and fun consultants. There is little no travel and a good corporate culture, though the firm is losing that as it continues to grow.

Cons – It's not an "up or out firm" there is no up after a few years so be ready to go to b-school/law school/ grad school. Management is not transparent about what is happening in the firm and can be non-communicative to junior staff. The hours are long, but that's the industry.

Advice to Senior Management – Create a better review and feedback process, the mentor system only works when sponsors have time to meet with their sponsorees.

Former Employee – worked at Bates White LLC

Pros – The offices are beautiful and the compensation was competitive. All of the people who worked there were pretty friendly and most of them were extremely intelligent.

Cons – It was a typical consulting environment where you work ridiculous hours. Also, I felt like the company was thinking short-term at times in that they would take on cases that they knew they were going to lose just to bill hours.

Advice to Senior Management – My advice would be to scrap the extremely extensive review process. It was time consuming and only about a third of the staff actually took them seriously.

Former Employee – worked at Bates White LLC

Pros – fantastic peer group - very smart, motivated, collaborative people
technically and analytically focused - opportunities to learn and develop rigorous analytic skills
strong compensation and benefits package

Cons – smaller firm means high variability and unpredictability in hours
work can get repetitive across clients
hard to move beyond mid-level without a doctorate

Advice to Senior Management – continue to focus on consultants' learning and skill development
try to better manage client's expectations and time horizons

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Bates White LLC

Pros – The work environment is very academic and you get to work with very intelligent people. Bates White encourages its employees to always ask questions and helps you to be most prepared to take on projects.

Cons – There's not enough client interaction. The projects are mostly completed individually and do not create opportunities to work in a bigger group settings.

Advice to Senior Management – Get lower level employees more involved.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Bates White LLC

Pros – - Collegial, sociable environment - it's easy to be friends with colleagues
- "Flat" management structure - you're encouraged to talk to everyone from the interns to the founders if you need anything
- Lots of training opportunities, esp. in things like Microsoft Office and Stata
- Lots of opportunities to learn new things on the job. Good mentoring network in place.
- Flexible work hours. So long as you get all your work done, nobody cares if you came in at 7am or 10:30am.
- Good health benefits
- Perks like ice cream socials, fresh fruit, endless supply of coffee/tea/soda/Perrier

Cons – - The standard work week is 45-50 hours. Depending on the project, this can easily jump to 60.
- The hours are unpredictable. We get requests from clients at any point of day and night, so it's not uncommon to get a sudden burst of work at 6pm, just as you're packing up to go home.
- There is not much of an opportunity for professional growth without an advanced degree. Although the firm prides itself on the few principals who had worked their way up the ladder with bachelor's degrees, they are the exception rather than the norm. Most people who start out as consultants leave within three years.
- The nature of the business is such that you never get public credit for your work. In fact, even within the firm most of the time it's the management that gets credited for the success of any project, with a vague nod to "the team".

Advice to Senior Management – Create more opportunities for junior consultants to feel like they are appreciated and have a future at the firm. Encourage more work-life balance.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Bates White LLC

Pros – High level staff are extremely competent, and if you're interested in either law or economics it's a great way to get exposure to both.

Cons – The competent people are not very available. They do not provide you with positive feedback and mostly have you working on extremely mundane work that requires little thinking. Environment is not very friendly, collaboration during work is not highly encouraged.

Advice to Senior Management – Spend more time talking to the lower level people. Rather than figuring out what to do in a meeting without them, if you collaborate it could lead to a more productive atmosphere fore everyone.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Bates White LLC

Pros – good pay, benefits, overall culture. really nice to have your own office with a door to close which is standard.

Cons – long hours, very unsteady work flow. you could work 45 hours one week and 90 the next. cyclical work. management unreliable in communication (read: layoffs)

Advice to Senior Management – need to work on communication with all staff members. seemed that they were not always honest with explaining how the firm was doing financially

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Bates White LLC

Pros – great work enviorment small team dedicated focused

Cons – Slow Management decisions.Fragmented practice areas.

Advice to Senior Management – Focus practie areas on subject specificity.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend