Cornerstone Research Employee Reviews about "work life balance"

Pros

- Very generous compensation (pay setter in the industry I gather) - While hours can be long, managers genuinely try their best to make work load more predictable and to avoid weekend work - Strong litigation focus, and thus more predictable hours than when working on mergers - Intelligent colleagues - Good to pick up some data analysis and R/Stata/SAS coding skills, handy if you want to do a PhD - Very, very friendly and supportive colleagues - Very nice offices, very centrally located - Good training (e.g., the "IM house" training when you join, which is basically a case simulation) - Broad range of cases (antitrust litigation, damages, securities litigation, consumer fraud and product liability, IP, etc.)

Cons

- Progression beyond Research Associate (position usually during the 4th year at Cornerstone) almost impossible unless you get a PhD or MBA (though this is not a problem if you were just planning on getting some pre-PhD or pre-MBA experience anyway) - A bit too little direct interaction with senior staff, a bit too hierarchical - Sometimes mundane tasks (but that's the same at any company in this industry) - I only give 4 stars before of career progression, but if you just want to learn a lot over 3-4 years and then do, say, a PhD, I'd say Cornerstone is just amazing for that. You will work hard, but you will still have time to socialize, do stuff over the weekend, exercise, etc. And despite a reasonably good work life balance, you will still get paid very well. So if you are planning on doing an MBA or PhD, I'd say this is a 5 star company

Pros

*I met and worked with a lot of nice and bright analysts, many of which have moved on to do interesting things *You learn (frequently via trial by fire) core skills in communication, attention to detail, etc. as a first job out of college *Managers tend to be empathetic and grateful for the work that you do *Decent exit opps if you are looking to go into tech (on the one hand, a few hiring managers will recognize the CR brand as a very strong signal, but on the other the industries are quite different so it can be hard to transition)

Cons

*work-life balance: analysts don't typically work a lot in terms of absolute hours, but you can have no work for a couple of weeks and then have 70-80 weeks for the next *many managers are PhD's and can have trouble with managing analyst time and developing analysts (a lot of the times you'll be assigned menial tasks with little context) *compensation does not reflect the stressful nature of the work