A Day in the Life of an Economic Consultant | Bates White (Podcast)

We’re back with Bates White for a deeper look into the world of economic consulting through a conversation with Amelia Irvine, a Manager in the firm’s Life Sciences Practice.

The wide-ranging discussion covers:

• How Amelia successfully transitioned from politics to consulting
• What a “normal” day-in-the-life of an economic consultant looks like
• Critical cover letter do’s and don’ts
• Key candidate qualities Bates White looks for
• The Bates White case interview process – demystified
• Why being able to get excited about dishwashers *may* mean you’re cut out to be a consultant

Interested in working for a firm like Bates White? Good news – the firm is hiring! See current openings here.

Relevant Links

• Listen to episode #1 in this series (Bates White Partner Scott Weishaar)
• Explore careers at Bates White
• Follow Bates White on LinkedIn
• Contact Bates White: [email protected]
• Get a resume and cover letter edit
• MBB application deadlines

Transcription: A Day in the Life of an Economic Consultant

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

Amelia, we’re really excited to have you today. Thank you so much for joining the podcast.

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Of course. Thank you so much for having me.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

Well, as we welcome you to Strategy Simplified, will you just tell us your story? You know, how in the world did you start where you started and get where you got, just to kind of walk us through a little bit of your background here?

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Sure. So I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and I really wanted to go and explore the East Coast for college. At the time, I was very interested in policy and politics and so Georgetown seemed like the perfect place for me. I really enjoyed my time there, I did a variety of internships and sort of tested out what I was interested in within the politics sphere and landed at the Council of Economic Advisors right after college.

After about a year and a half there, I was ready for a change and I wanted to continue doing quantitative analyses, research, writing, and was looking for a new context and a new challenge. And through some connections there at my last job and professors from Georgetown, I had sort of discovered Bates White and that’s how I ended up here.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

Fantastic, amazing. Now there are a lot of listeners that we have that are interested in the journey from politics over. So you made it sound like it was just like you woke up in the morning and it was super easy, but I’m sure it was a little bit more detailed than that. So, can you talk a little bit about what steps you took to actually enter into a new field here?

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Absolutely. So I’ll start by saying, when I began looking for another job, I had never heard of economic consulting. I was not really sure what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted sort of out of the politics sphere that had become tiring for me, and I was ready for something new, and I started by asking people I worked with, you know, saying I want to do similar work to this.

I really like doing the research we do. I like taking a research question and running with it. And I like having some stakes a little bit of pressure and a sense that the work that I’m doing it matters and is informative and through that, one of the chairmen at the time said, you know, all of the things you’re saying, seems like economic consulting would be perfect for you.

You know, it’s challenging, you have an opportunity to still have some insight into the legal sphere, so you can scratch that itch if you want to and you’ll continue to be able to do data work and also qualitative research. And it seemed like the right fit.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

Amazing. What’s one piece of advice that you would have for people that want to make the transition?

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

I would say talking to folks is super important, just reaching out to people that you already know or maybe knew people through, that you have connected through, connected with on LinkedIn. Folks are generally very willing to help. I think that I found there’s a sort of pass it on culture where when I was looking for a job, I would ask for help.

I’ve definitely sent my fair share of cold emails or cold messages and gotten really helpful responses. And so now I try to do that same thing for other people. And I think that’s just generally how it works, that people are very willing to help you and you shouldn’t be afraid to reach out.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

Now, one thing that is kind of funny to me when I was at Bain, we would give people this advice, but what I was surprised about was how few people actually took it. Can you just give us a sense? Like are you answering like 100 cold emails a day? What’s the actual volume of people that are reaching out to you? Because I think a lot of people have this feeling that everybody’s doing it, but actually nobody’s doing it. I’m just curious to put some data behind it. What would you say is the actual volume of cold emails that you’re getting in a day, a month, a year, whatever you think the right number is there?

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

I would say definitely not more than one a month. We do have some recruiting events where I will give similar advice to this and then I’ll normally get a couple after that, but I wouldn’t call it necessarily super cold because that person already sort of knows who I am. But I’d say true cold emails maybe six or seven a year.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

I mean, that’s crazy, right? For the volume of people that you’re like “do this, this is the one thing!” Then it just means that the people that do it are in such an advantaged position. So I love that. Thanks for that data point, that’s awesome.

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

I think it’s exactly like office hours in college. Everyone tells you, you should go to office hours. They’re so beneficial and it’s so hard to actually pull the trigger and do it, I think because it feels awkward at the beginning or you feel like you’re really putting yourself out there, but once you sort of cross that hurdle, it’s not really scary. It’s just so easy to procrastinate on it and just never do it. But if you do it, it’s so helpful.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

I think that is a super call out. Yeah, I never thought about the parallels, but you’re totally right. Well, I just want to pivot a little bit and talk now about your time and your work at Bates White. And so how would you have described what you did at Bates White before you came in? And what is your now understanding of the kind of broader work that the firm does?

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Sure. So I think before I started at Bates White, I did my best to get a good idea of what we did. I think it was still definitely incomplete, but because folks I had talked to had been on the expert side, they are PhD economists who had worked with Bates White as an academic affiliate in the past. They described it as, you know, Bates White will support experts, expert witnesses as they put together reports, prepare for deposition, prepare to testify at trial.

And I think that’s a very good general description of what we do. I don’t think our work is limited to just expert support work, but generally we do quite a bit of that. We also support clients in arbitrations or mediations and most of the time there’s some sort of conflict and we’re on one side or the other of that conflict and trying to analyze data, summarize research and get sort of to the heart of issues.

So I would say my understanding now that I’ve been at Bates White for several years that the day to day is variable across people and people love to say, you know, there’s no typical day, but that’s not actually very helpful. I think if we are to talk about averages, folks will spend probably 50% or more of their time working with data, whether that is cleaning data that we receive from a client, processing data, or summarizing it to get helpful insights.

Also doing the analyses, maybe involving some statistical test or just putting together beautiful figures to sort of illustrate what the data show about a particular point. Because at the end of the day, we want our data to be able to assist our clients—typically the direct people we work with are lawyers—to assist them to understand the issues that are at the heart of their cases. And so we have to take these complicated data sets and explain them very succinctly and clearly to very smart, typically lawyers who don’t know anything about data and don’t know anything about economics at the very beginning. So I think that’s one of the fun parts of this job is taking something very complicated and trying to distill it down to the core ideas and how to present it in a way that’s actually understandable.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

I love that. Well, speaking of fun, you spent a year and a half at your first job. Now you’ve been at it for three or so years, is that right? And so, clearly something’s going well and we would love to know just a little bit about what you have figured out was so attractive to you. What you really do, like, was it just what your supervisor at the first job said it would be, or is there something else that you’ve kind of discovered that you’re really enjoying about the work?

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Yeah, I think there are a couple of things. I’ve focused mostly on the work so far and the work is really fun at the end of the day. I’m a very curious person and I think people who are curious tend to really like the work at Bates White because you’ll really dive deep into all sorts of random issues. You might learn everything there is to know about a certain drug class or everything there is to know about dishwashers and if that can sort of excite you, if you can get interested in, Ok, so what does this little detail mean for the bigger picture? Then I think that’s awesome and has been really helpful for me. I think the other big part is our people and our culture.

That’s something that I think companies throw around a lot, but has really been true for me at Bates White, where the people I work with genuinely care about my development and pretty much from day one have been looking for opportunities for me to grow and for opportunities for me to learn more talk with experts, talk with clients. And I don’t think that that culture exists everywhere, sort of a noncompetitive, lifting up the whole team type of environment. And I also part of that is people at all levels are seen and heard and respected.

So when you go to a team meeting, it’s more than acceptable, it’s encouraged for everyone to speak up, from the brand new consultant to the partner. And I think that that’s very helpful, to get all the ideas out on the table, because we do work in this sort of high stakes environment. We want the ideas that we put forward to be very strong and solid and so encouraging everyone to speak up and you know, if you see something, say something, no matter if you could be wrong or you don’t have all the information. But just sort of this culture of being open and we’re all trying to do the best we can to get to the right answer here, so let’s all work together to get there.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

One way that you know that you’re a consultant is you’re excited about dishwashers. I mean, right. When you said that I thought, well, this is an occupational hazard for sure. I wanna go back to the recruitment process. In the recruitment process, there’s this kind of navigation and negotiation where you’re figuring out whether the culture is a good fit and where they’re figuring out if you’re a good fit for the culture. What do you think they did well in the recruitment process specifically that helped illuminate some of these positive cultural aspects that you’re talking about that made you want to say yes to them. And also now being on the other side of it, what do you notice now that they were probably evaluating and you that helped you be successful?

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Yeah, sure. I did the recruitment process fully remotely so I think did a really great job even though it was totally like 100% over Zoom. I think there are a couple pieces of the recruitment process that can illustrate this, one is that in both our 1st and 2nd round set of interviews, you’ll have interviews with consultants directly.

It will be you plus two consultants, maybe a manager and a consultant too, which is in total a year of experience, or maybe two senior consultants and they’ll walk you through a case study. And I think what’s interesting about that interview is that even if you’re a relatively junior person at the firm, you’re still an interviewer and you’re still asked to give an opinion at the end of that interview day of what you think went well, what you think didn’t go so well.

And that’s something that I definitely notice where it was comical. Like there’s me, there’s two other 20-somethings and it’s just the three of us in this interview and we’re talking about, you know, interest rate disputes or something like that. And it is just sort of a signal that the consultants are empowered, and their opinions are taken to be pretty valuable if they’re a big part of that interview process.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

That’s amazing. And then what about from the flip side? What were they looking for in you now that you notice as you’ve been on the other side of the table?

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Yeah, definitely. I think one of the main things is curiosity and interest in the work, because it’s just so much more helpful if the whole team is invested in a project and invested in what we do and doing it. That’s something that I definitely look for in interviews, where if someone is excited about the case material or are they asking questions that show that they’ve looked at our website and have some understanding of what economic consulting is, because we want people to go in sort of with both eyes open and understand how economic consulting is different from other types of consulting that are more commonly talked about on college campuses. So I think understanding that we typically work in the litigation environment, we work with data. Those are sort of the the main two differences that would be helpful to just have as background knowledge when you go and start thinking about questions.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

Well, now you’re a manager in the life sciences practice. So what does your day look like? What are you spending your time on? Are you still deep in the data? Are you still, working one project at a time, going super deep on it? Are you doing multiple? Are you managing teams? Tell us just a little bit about what your specific role is like now.

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the evolution for me has felt pretty natural. So when I first started, I was doing a lot of the data work myself, writing scripts, working in Excel, writing sections of the report, sort of summarize the analysis I was working on. And over time, my role has shifted more towards helping others do those things and providing feedback and guidance on writing a script or how should we tackle this particular research question.

Like, let me give you some ideas to get started. It’s rare for me to start writing my own script or to go into Excel and to do my own set of figures. It’s a lot more likely now that I review someone else’s work, make suggestions, make recommendations. And my role has also become more client and expert focus as well. I think at Bates White, we try to include everyone in the process of preparing an expert for deposition, for example.

But I’m much more likely now to be the first line of defense in coming up with good prep questions or in communicating with an expert about changing the scope of their report, or similarly interfacing more with clients about our the scope of our work, some of the findings we have, and helping plan out what our process looks like and making sure that we’re all on the same page about what exactly it is that they would like us to do and communicating with them if we’re finding something that is helpful or is not helpful for their goals.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

I love it. Well, you can speak to your current role or your role prior as a consultant. But talk to me a little bit about a day in the life, right? We, we talked about now the macro view of all the things that you’re doing. but is it 18 meetings back-to-back for 15 minutes each? Is it four hours of deep data analysis? What does the day in the life look like for you right now and if there are two or three of those, just kind of walk me through two or three different versions of a day.

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Sure. So every day is different, that’s the classic disclaimer. But I would say that I typically have a mix of meetings and individual work. So I might have a team meeting or meet with people one on one about a specific analysis. And I also have a number of non-billable commitments as well that take up part of my time. So, for example, I’m on the leadership team for our summer consultant program.

So that involves a lot of planning events ahead of time, helping with staffing and sort of setting up their mentorship structures ahead of time. And so that also has been a big part of my sort of day in the life lately, but there are a variety of ways to get involved at Bates White other than just the billable work. I’ll typically have some sort of summer consultant, program meeting during the day or the week.

And then in terms of my solo work, that will typically be a mix of reviewing others work and sort of providing very specific feedback such as, I think this line figure could also be like a chart or something like that, as well as reading and writing reports, both for our experts and reviewing reports from the other side’s experts. So typically, we will be hired by attorneys on one side of litigation and there’s some other economic consulting firm on the other side that also submits reports. So I think one of the the fun parts of my job is I still am quite involved with the rebuttal process. So reading a new report, helping come up with what our rebuttal looks like, and that can be the most variable part of the job, but also very fun.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

Amazing. Now I’m imagining what I picture in movies about the law because I was never a lawyer, these kind of massive report stacks. I mean, what are we talking about? Are they in PowerPoint, are they PDF? Are they four pages or 98 pages? Like what’s the actual deliverable look like for something that you guys are putting together here?

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Yeah, so we definitely do slides and presentations for clients, but typically that would be more in like a consulting capacity versus an expert capacity. What we will typically submit for an expert report is some sort of PDF, think of a white paper type document. And they can very much vary in terms of length.

I think maybe the shortest I’ve seen or heard of is, you know, six or seven pages that summarizes very briefly the facts of the case and then what economic theory might say about the case. I think the longest report I’ve ever heard of was probably in the three or four hundreds of pages where you might have 27 analyses and a long literature review and a long section about the what the documents in the case say.

And maybe some examples of what those documents say. And you know, don’t even get me started on the appendices with different figures with slight modifications, like if you deal with the data in this way, this is what the figure looks like. If you answer this question in a slightly different way, here’s what this figure looks like alternatively. So you might have hundreds of figures, thousands of footnotes in some of these really massive reports. I’d say the average report is probably 150 pages. We’re basically writing a book for every report.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

I love it. Well, what is a typical highlight in a week for you? Is it a team meeting? Is it a moment digging into report with a hot cup of coffee? Is it a happy hour? You know, just walk me through kind of like, hey, this is something that’s always a highlight for me in a given week.

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Yeah, I think my highlights have a lot to do with the mentorship piece of my job. So I really like when I’m helping someone develop a certain skill or learn about a topic and they finally have like the aha! moment. I find that to be one of the most satisfying parts of the job. And this will definitely come into play once our summer consultants start too, because they are just full of aha moments, even simple things on, for example, communication where they’ll come in and say, I’m not sure if I’m bothering my supervisor, I’m really reaching out to them a lot and I’ll say something like, have you asked them about how often they want you to communicate with them or if they prefer Teams or stopping by their office or setting up a meeting? And when you’re early in your career, that just is a genius idea. And it’s very satisfying for me to be able to help people become better at their jobs too. I really love the teaching aspect.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

I love it. Well, speaking of mentorship, what are the top 2 to 3 skills or qualities that you look for in your candidates?

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Definitely, I think for folks coming in with some experience, we definitely look for a dedication and mentorship because we have such such a team-based culture where you’ll be working with other folks on reports. Looking for experience working on a team, experience teaching someone how to do something new. Those are both really important as well as fitting in in terms of our collegiality.

Because we do work in this environment where we’re going up against another side, typically, we want to avoid there being a lot of competition within the firm. So we want folks who are very focused on teamwork and lifting others up, asking questions, admitting when you don’t know something. All of those are good qualities.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

I love it. What would you say are any mindsets, resources, specific tactical tips that in light of the economic uncertainty that’s happening right now, a candidate should adopt if they’re approaching economic consulting, and Bates White in particular?

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

What do you mean by..?

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

How do they stand out? Do they need to read something? Do they need to talk to two people inside the firm? Is there anything that you’re just, like, look, this is a baseline? Because you’ve talked a lot about their general attitudes and their skills and I love that. They do have to get an interview too, so I’m guessing there’s maybe something related to that.

But maybe you also can debunk some myths and I’l give you an example. When I was at Bain, people would come in and they’d be like, I read this or I listened to this podcast and I didn’t do the podcast and you know, we’re on a podcast right now, but it wasn’t personal enough, right? It was a very heady thing. And so I told people, you can do that for your own benefit, but it’s not gonna be the game changer that will actually resonate with somebody inside the organization because you, Amelia, maybe don’t listen to the Bates White podcast with everybody going on all the time. So you can’t refer to that episode and all of a sudden there’s this awkward moment inside the interview and so if there’s also a “don’t do,” I think that would be helpful for people.

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Yeah, okay, that makes sense. So, getting into the specifics of what I think would be helpful for someone applying, I think step one is thinking about your cover letter carefully. So we read every cover letter, it doesn’t go through some sort of machine learning. We have actual humans reading every cover letter and showing in the cover letter that you understand what the job entails, that you’re interested in both quantitative and qualitative work and writing the cover letter in such a way that demonstrates the clear communication skills. We don’t need anything super flowery or crazy, just something that’s pretty straightforward and shows a good understanding of what we do and how your background fits into what we do will be great. And I think that will be sufficient to get you in the door. Disclaimer, that might not be true.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

But I think what you’re saying is that you disqualify a lot of people for something that they might have not given a second thought to, right.

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

So like the cover letter, I think sometimes people don’t think too carefully about it or they use their cover letter for management consulting jobs and so it doesn’t cover the same sort of types of things that we’re looking for. I don’t need you to use the word synergy or collaboration in your cover letter. Also getting into specifics, we have on our website a couple example case interviews. I think that this was a pretty intimidating thing for me coming in because I didn’t have any background in doing the consulting recruiting and the website shows you sort of what our case interviews look like because those are also going to be different than the management or strategy consulting.

Ours are going to be a lot more of a series of guided word problems with math and concepts or we’ll talk about the concepts to start off and then sort of ask you to apply those using different numbers that we provide. And I think that kind of demystifies the process if you go to the website and look at the sample case. And I personally found that quite helpful because before my interview, I started reading through my industrial organization notes and trying to think through how do I even prepare for this?

You don’t need to read about industrial organization. You don’t need to have a background in economics specifically, as long as you are able to absorb what’s talked about in the case interview and then apply that, similar to how you would do word problems in math class.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

I love that. I think that’s very illuminating. Well, before we move to our final fun questions just about you, I just want to give you the floor one last time. If you have any final tips, insights, recommendations, either about your work or about what candidates should think about when they’re looking at Bates White.

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Definitely. I think the only thing that I haven’t really touched on that is important is that at Bates White, you do have the opportunity to build a long career here. If that’s something that you’re interested in, there are quite a few people who come in, stay for 3 to 5 years, then go to law school or go and work in the startup world, or go to get their MBA.

But there are also quite a few folks who are principals, partners, who don’t have a PhD, and that was something that was very attractive to me as I was considering my next move because I really enjoyed school. But after I left school, I really did not want to go back. I found that I’ve been able to learn so much in this job and as long as I’m always learning and doing new things, I can envision myself staying for the long term. And that’s sort of a unique thing about Bates White, where we have partners who started at Bates White as their very first job out of undergrad and have been here a number of years and are now expert testifiers or lead million dollar books of business for other experts. And I think that’s something that’s really unique. And if you are sort of interested in doing this as a long-term career, but don’t necessarily know if you want to go back to school, then Bates White is a really great option.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

I love it. Well, the final three questions are just for us to have a little fun and get to know you personally a little bit better, and short answers are perfect for these. So I’ll just run through them one at a time. Number one, in an alternate universe, you have to choose a completely different career. What would it be?

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

I would probably be a ballet dancer. I did ballet growing up, I would be a ballerina.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

Amazing. Okay, second, most unusual food you’ve ever tried.

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

This is maybe an Arizona sort of kitschy tourist thing, but I’ve tried rattlesnake. It does taste like chicken.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

That’s amazing. We just killed two snakes on our property that were in front of our house this week. Our general rule is that snakes in the wild, we should leave them all alone, but when you come to my house, sorry, but we didn’t eat them, and I was a little disappointed about that. I asked my husband to grill them maybe next time. Now I know what I could serve you for dinner if you come over. Just kidding. The third thing, you’ve seen the inner side of politics. Would you ever consider running for office and why or why not?

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

No, I think a lot of people have a misconception about what it means to actually hold office and you spend so much time fundraising that there’s not really a lot of time to do the things that you go in wanting to accomplish. So I don’t see myself ever running for office.

MC: Jenny Rae Le Roux

I love it. Amazing. Well, Amelia, it was so wonderful to have you on. I felt like we had a couple of real aha moments in our conversation today that are gonna help a lot of people both on the to-do and the not-to-do side. And I think that you really gave a great perspective on what life was like at Bates White. So thank you so much for your time. Really glad to have you on.

Bates White: Amelia Irvine

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.