Pros
The firm pays a significant amount of attention to using common sense. Since this is a smaller and relatively younger firm, the infrastructure has not all been set up yet, so people often operate with their own judgment vs. set firm guidelines. Since all employees are required to take an IQ exam and personality quiz as part of the interview process (based on the Wonderlic test amongst others), all employees are vetted by past experience and actual performance. This results in a group of extremely high performing consultants who have similar mindsets of getting the job done no matter what it takes. Everyone is also quite humble, down to earth, and family oriented (especially since the majority of the employees tend to have at least 5-8 years of experience when they are hired, but there are also some hires of people with 2-3 years of experience). The pay is probably better than most consultancy firms on average, simply because you get paid overtime and a year-end bonus, which amounts to a good portion of your salary. They also offer great healthcare benefits for you and your dependents.
Cons
Because of the older nature of the employees who also may have families to raise, there tends to be less focus on bonding and socializing out of the office and more of a culture of getting home asap after work. There is also somewhat generation gap between Directors and Associates who work very closely on the same team. In contrast to Big Four firms where the MDs and Senior Managers hardly interact with the Associates, AlixPartners has small teams where all members of the team from young to experienced work hand in hand. This generation gap also shifts the culture dynamics within a team as certain traits of a younger group may not be compatible with the ways of an older age group. Also, there may be more stereotyping of what a younger generation is or is not capable of. When being managed by people closer in age, they are able to judge abilities more accurately since the supervisor was would have been in the same shoes not too long ago. For people who join in the middle of the year, there is not much guidance or hand holding through the onboarding process. There is a 2-3 day orientation that gets you set up, but career growth, professional development, and finding engagements is all up to you after that. The buddy/mentor system is very fragile and not always set up properly. Therefore, employees need to take much more initiative to reach out to others and find out how the firm operates. The work tends to revolve around restructuring/bankruptcy most of the time, since that's what the reputation of the firm is in. Sometimes there are other types of projects, but these are the ones that get most of the attention and larger staffed teams. All practices of the firm (FAS, EMS, IMS, and TRS) could be involved in a single client. Sometimes the work is interesting, but at the lower levels, it could be just tedious and mundane. Since it also takes a while to be promoted in this firm, people who are quite senior could also be doing tedious or mundane tasks -- for example, it's not uncommon for Directors to be creating and editing Powerpoints or drafting up financial models. The firm also relies heavily on paper documentation and binders, which seems a bit old-fashioned. However, in working with law firms and bankruptcy courts, I guess this may be a necessary evil.