Round Table Group - Does it work?

August 18, 2009 3:26 PM

About every 3 months, I receive an email asking me to join this company's [The Round Table Group (http://www.roundtablegroup.com/)] network of experts as a consultant. Is it worth my time? Is it a rotten deal? Are they blowing smoke?

I have expertise in certain areas of engineering. I work at a university as a researcher. In the past I served as a consultant to law firms couple times (one big patent case that made the tech news headlines and another that involved disagreement between two companies on what caused extensive damage to a jet plane). In both cases, I was directly contacted by the law firm (different firms) and in both cases they were more than satisfied by my services. However, this is not a usual line of business for me. I should also mention that I am not the go-to person for the services they were looking for; there is no go-to person, there are a whole bunch of qualified people who could have done the job.

I would like to do more consulting (who wouldn't, right). And this company seem to facilitate this. AFAICS they take a certain percentage from your consulting fee and probably from the firms hiring the consultants too. It looks like, a professor from Stanford University works with them and studies their business plan (does that give the company more credibility? I don't know).

Long story short, any MeFite who may have had experience with this company on either end of the deal (law firm or expert), could you please share your experience?

As always, thanks so much!

(I am sure a number of MeFites have received the invitation email and would greatly appreciate an AskMeFi-thread on the topic.)

posted by anonymous to work & money (4 comments total)

I get those. I trash them.
posted by rokusan at 3:37 PM on August 18

I get them too. I also trash them. In my experience, most consulting offers come by personal referral.
posted by B-squared at 4:56 PM on August 18

I get them at about the same frequency and I also delete. I'll watch the thread with interest
to see if anyone has had good experiences.
posted by Fiery Jack at 6:07 PM on August 18

I am a lawyer who handles technical and complex cases, and I use expert witnesses regularly. There are a number of "placement" companies which serve to put lawyers in touch with people with expertise. As you can imagine, they run the spectrum from very reputable to less than so.

In 29 years of doing this, I can say that I have never heard of this group/company. Perhaps that tells you what you need to know.
posted by megatherium at 8:21 PM on August 18