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1. Money and Billing - B&F is one of the highest billing practice, high bonuses and eventually high pay at partner levels. ECM sucks on this front as they can barely cover team costs, so any firm practicing this is actually making losses from this practice. Forget bonuses, and the partners make the least, maybe above IP.
2. Inhouse Ops - You dont get any transferability to such positions from ECM. Maybe foreign firms, not companies. B&F on the other hand, surely. The reason is self explanatory.
3. Never ending diligence - This is true for B&F, you work every day 365. The work is continuous. ECM is cyclical, there are months you have no work and many firms fire associates then, after which they overhire when work suddenly increases. This is common practice. B&F me people leave on their own due to continuous mind drowning work.
4. Dynamic - ECM is ANYTHING but dynamic. You work on the same DRHP and backups all your life, at all stages. B&F is highly dynamic though, even though there are templates, as there are negotiations are higher levels done.
1. Volume-Driven, never ending due diligence, sleepless nights almost every day (Jan, Feb, March is a total nightmare due to financial closing).
2. Monotonous and boring after 1 to 3 years
3. Requires copy pasting and smart work without much thinking and analysis as compared to majority of the practice areas
4. Fixed fee billings and clients who want bulky work done for pennies
5. Juniors thrown under the bus until the PA Stage since there is very little document hygiene and direct oversight by the senior members who solely manage negotiation and vetting
Pros:
1. After 3 to 5 years, the practice feels like a game since you end up learning a lot at the junior stage
2. Quite dynamic in terms of service offerings i.e. structured debt, project finance, securitization, term loans, fintech, restructuring, IPOs, QIPs, preferential allotments; et al, thus very steep learning curve.
3. Too much attrition at tier 1s until the A3 stage so more lateral opportunities at big firms
4. Way too many in-house openings at the seniority stage with 25-30% paycut for the sake of sanity
5. Since these practices expect no room for any form of mistakes, you master skills like formatting, math (upto a certain extent), book keeping and develop a financial bend of mind.
You're still reading a ton of documents for that deal in M&A or regurgitating on disputes side.
Don't mean to dunk on other domains but would like to understand the pessimism towards BnF/Cap marks.