It’s utterly disappointing how many individuals in middle management and at Director level are downright unimpressive managers and have minimal qualities worth emulating. Given how demanding the world of litigation can be and how crucial communication skills are in that context, I expected better. However, why this comes about isn’t difficult to figure out. The culture dictates that people are work horses, and in the worst cases, indentured servants. When one project ends, you basically roll right onto another without any substantive “lessons learned” conversations from the expert or leads.
On the topic of evaluations, although annual ones cover areas like PM and Teamwork, promotions are essentially based on hours billed and not actual performance or capacity to lead. To make this particular matter worse, each person elects their own contributors for evaluations. In one year, an individual who I worked with on nearly all of my billable projects didn’t solicit my feedback, and I imagine it’s because they knew I would’ve divulged how much of a joke they were. They ended up getting promoted that cycle and hence given more power to subject junior staff to their chaotic ways. I worked at two different offices in my tenure, and it happened in both places, so I think it’s safe to say perspective on effectiveness doesn’t reach those who decide on promotion unless it’s sought by those decision makers or you speak up outside of the official review process. Paradoxically, even if your clearly defined target chargeability percentage is met, unless you’re near or over 100%, there’s a sense that you’re not a dedicated employee. This is especially frustrating because junior staff are at the mercy of work that is available when they are available. The result is far too many people up and down the hierarchy who prioritize billing hours as opposed to being effective in their roles, all in order to get into senior positions without any true management or communication discipline. It’s most unsettling when this failure is evident in a Managing Director (top of the ladder), since incentives for them to change behavior are nonexistent.
Another disconcerting aspect is how many MDs/experts have either no actual industry experience or no concrete analytics experience. When I say industry I mean the industry that is the subject of the litigation and when I say analytics I mean technical understanding of what goes into an analytic deliverable. I’ll address the latter first, which manifests in an all-too-apparent skill divide between the highly intelligent, flexible, and efficient junior/low-senior staff members and comparatively unskilled MDs who wield too much power. It’s especially awkward to navigate from a communication standpoint when the unskilled MD is always ready to say “yes” to (equally unskilled) attorney clients when they request analytics that don’t make sense or are too cumbersome to produce given the bigger picture focus of existing work streams. Practically speaking, it simply leads to unrealistic expectations and dysfunctional projects. Regarding the lack of industry experience held my too many MDs, what’s most daunting is these people are tapped to be testifying experts that could influence the fates of sometimes millions of lives, let alone millions of dollars, which is ethically dubious.
Lastly, my honest conclusion is even though BRG is nearly a decade old, its ability to facilitate growth in actual industry expertise is immature if not absent entirely. Perhaps most importantly, litigation support as a long-term career path at BRG will be overly arduous and fraught with stress, so to not have any gain come from that investment of time and energy is disheartening. You can spend a decade working your way up the ladder, sacrificing your personal life along the way, but it’s extremely unlikely you’ll be effective at finding law firms who will hire you as a testifying expert if you’ve never done the work on the ground in the industry itself. Similarly, it will be difficult to find fulfillment in managing analytics-heavy projects when you don’t have control over the processes, since that control is ceded to the “expert”, who oftentimes doesn’t “get” analytics. If you’re an analytics professional or aspire to be one, starting here could be advantageous, but I would encourage you to leave once you hit your stride and can demand a higher salary so you can put your skills toward an end that appreciates your intelligence/relevance.
