Good question.
@danieljonesqb
Why did I switch?
I will be perfectly honest here. I felt that I would not enjoy doing the tasks I did on my vacation scheme for many hours a day. For context, I also completed my summer vacation scheme during the peak of the pandemic and was not converted because of my answer to two questions in the exit interview (frustrating I know).
Going back to the point about the tasks - my tasks, along with the tasks of more senior people, involved doing a large amount of paperwork for corporate transactions. This is expected as a large part of your client ‘deliverables’ as a transactional lawyer are contracts. I simply was not excited to work for the foreseeable future in a paperwork-driven job. I also never enjoyed litigation. However, I enjoyed the exposure to the key business context of the work and the client advisory element. I also enjoyed law in academia so I did not want to give up on my legal skills altogether.
In this context, financial regulatory consulting seemed to combine the best of both the business and legal worlds. Financial regulation, in general, is a very multi-disciplinary subject and you can witness lawyers, economists, stats and quant specialists, and even coders in the field.
My answer to the ‘why consulting over law?’ interview question
It leads on from the points I made above. In specific, I stressed on three primary reasons.
I desired to work in a role where I could directly make a difference to the business model of a client.
For example, if I am advising an investment bank as a financial regulatory consultant, I could advise on how the bank should be governed, the internal controls that should exist, help senior management modify business strategy to accommodate upcoming legislative changes etc. This would be opposed to a transactional lawyers’ contract-drafting driven job. Even if I worked as a financial regulation advisory lawyer, my role would be restricted to simply interpreting legislation for clients.
Consultants enjoy significantly more exposure to clients due to the nature of their job.
If you are a consultant, you will enjoy a huge amount of exposure to your clients. In fact, you will often work directly in their offices (called ‘working on-site’ in consulting). You will also travel extensively, nationally and internationally, to complete these commitments. For example, in my first year, my firm mandates up to 25% of my year going towards travelling to network offices and client offices in Europe (pandemic permitting). Such deep exposures to multiple clients over let’s say 5 years is hugely enriching for your skill set.
I wanted a profession that was not limited by jurisdictional boundaries and was truly international.
Law firms often talk about how ‘international’ their work is - and it is - but there exist practical limitations on it. For example, you cannot really advise clients on the domestic law of other countries due to local attorney regulations. In reality, this makes the cross-border mobility of the profession poor. However, management consulting is not a regulated profession. As long as you have the business acumen you can work anywhere in the world. This is because my advice does not constitute ‘legal advice’ that is regulated but rather ‘business advice,’ even though there is overlap in fin. reg..
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bonus justification that only applies to financial regulatory consulting is that my ability to interpret regulations and advise financial services clients on their impact is already strong because I come from a corporate law background.
Happy to clarify anything else!
