The latest Suits episode had a shot of the CN tower, Daniel Day Lewis playing MacBeth, and a reference to Jean Valjean. More importantly, there was a scene on lawyers vs. bankers. The professional services career paths include banking, consulting, law and accounting. Queen’s Commerce is a machine that funnels people into each of these disciplines with relative ease. At their core, they are all consultants in their own right – they help firms solve their most difficult problems.
Banking, law and accounting add value through specialization. Most firms have these functions in-house but not enough to handle short, extensive spurts (like an M&A transaction). It would be uneconomical to hire a full service team year-round for the odd requirement. Consultants benefit from specialization, but to a lesser degree. A consultant is paid to think, which does not seem to be a skill that benefits from specialization. Instead, consultancies profit from labour arbitrage: they rent out brains to firms that cannot otherwise attract or afford them year-round.
At my group, we hire advisers from each of the four functions. Although each has its own scope, they end up doing similar things. In one case, when the consultants and bankers couldn’t agree on the numbers, the accountants came into give a third opinion. Stereotypes are reinforced. The bankers are the optimists (they only get paid on success); the lawyers are the pessimists (they don’t want to be sued). The lawyers can’t do math: in one exercise, their percentages added up to 90%. The accountants are soft spoken and mention IFRS in every other sentence. The consultants love talking in the clouds. They are brainy, well-dressed and have the best mints. The bankers never say no and stay up stupidly late.
