All of the following information about this company and its affiliates is based on my personal experience with its services and owner and on some reports of third parties. These are my opinions and those of others I trust.
There are some decent people at BCG, but they work for a person who I believe is a scum bag. The guy in charge of this company, Harrison Barnes, is (in my opinion) pathologically incapable of telling the truth about almost anything. He is a master at shading the truth. If you talk to him in an unguarded moment, he will tell you what a master he is at manipulating people. He will tell you that most people are beneath him. He will make himself out to be the greatest entrepreneur in the world. None of it is true.
It takes a singular sort of person to come up with what Harrison has come up with. First, he starts a legal recruiting company called BCG Attorney Search. He did not like recruiting, so he decided to go with a passive model and spend a lot of money on advertising to bring in candidates. His good idea was to use a bunch of web spiders and Indian subs to pull jobs off of the internet and post them on his website. Having done that, he pitched himself as a guy with a bunch of offices and recruiters. When I was aware of the facts, there were no more than 10 recruiters nationwide. None of them actually did much recruiting. Mostly they would fight over territories and place people off of the web ads. But he was claiming at the time to be a HUGE business, and he still is claiming that. If you read his website, you will be led to the conclusion that there are 100 people working at BCG. I can almost guarantee you that there are not even close to that number. I would bet that the majority of the people who do work for the company are probably still in India (which incidentally is where you will be if you ever need to call customer service for any of the affiliates - LawCrossing, Legal Authority, Resume Apple, etc.).
His next idea was to try to capitalize from the stream of weak candidates he was receiving in his recruiting business, so he started Legal Authority, which sends out resumes to a database of law firms and companies that his Indian subs came up with. That business charges law students and attorneys a hefty fee for sending resumes. The staff of resume writers, as I recall, was a couple of women in a small room. They were smart people who had attended a resume writing seminar. For twenty minutes of their time and a couple hundred sheets of paper run off of a big printer, Harrison would charge an average of about $1,200. This was translating to sales of $40-60K per week for his company. His websites still clearly say that he does not make any money off of the Legal Authority business because it's just a public service. He's lying. To the extent he's not making money, it's because he's cooking the books.
Speaking of cooking the books, one of Harrison's other tricks was to pay for his mortgage on his house through the company accounts. He would have people from the company occasionally stay at the house and he would host a Christmas party. For this, according to his former accountant, he would write off his mortgage through the company. This was a house worth several million dollars, mind you. So the extent that trick was legit, he possibly did not make any money.
The next act was to start Law Crossing, which (I have to hand it to him) has become an icon in the legal world. What does that business do? It scans the web and reposts jobs and charges candidates for the jobs. It fails to note that Harrison does not take old jobs down, and I believe that every fact you might find on the website for that company is false. Harrison is very bold about making statements of fact that are simply false. His principle is that people tend to assume good intent. "If you say it, people will want to believe it, " is something he said often in my presence.
What was interesting at Law Crossing was that Harrison obscured the fact that he was running that business from the recruiters at BCG. He would post the jobs from BCG on LawCrossing for anyone to see at first. He had a lot of trouble from his recruiters for that, most of whom were pretty lazy, because they did not want to see the jobs that they were working sold to people willing to pay $20/month (now it's $30/month I think - got to pay for the new house).
Law Crossing has managed to get the credit cards of thousands of lawyers around the country. They don't care that they could get the jobs somewhere else for free because it's not that much money (to an overpaid lawyer). Harrison thought the idea was so brilliant that he has launched into similar "Crossings" for other sectors - healthcare, sales, you name it. I seriously doubt that those businesses are convincing smart people to put down their cards for $30/month at anywhere close to the same rate. Who would PAY to see a job listing? The idea was brilliant for lawyers, though. Just don't believe a SINGLE THING you read on the website. The business has an F rating with the Better Business Bureau, I believe.
Next act - Cross marketing to attorneys and others who want to refinance their loans. Harrison started a student loan consolidation company. He got into a little trouble when someone noticed that he was calling his company a "bank" and that claim came down. Other brazen claims remain. If you want to consolidate loans, there is no reason to offer a skim to Harrison Barnes. Call your bank or Sallie Mae! This episode of Harrison's troubles brings up the story of someone else who was screwed by Harrison - a guy named Peter who worked with Harrison to set up the consolidation business. Peter was from a fancy firm in New York and was really full of himself for no apparant reason because he could not manage a group to save his life. But he had the idea to start the loan consolidations and wound up leaving after he had set it up to do the same thing at Vault (another lousy company, BTW). That person is not a fan of Harrison because, as in so many cases, he is said to have failed to keep promises.
You see, everything is cross marketed at BCG/LawCrossing/Legal Authority, etc. If you want a little glimpse into the soul of the guy that runs the place, look at his employmentcrossing.com video of himself petting his dog (proof that the affection of your dog is no evidence as to your value as a human being). He goes into how all he's ever wanted to do is help people and to do research while pounding on the dog. It's priceless. He talks about his split family and other things supposedly from his life. None of it is really true. He said once that his mother was an alcoholic, and I know that his parents have long been divorced. But he is not all about research and helping. He's about sending out resumes - there is a minimum quota of sent resumes at BCG every week that is enforced. Do you want to work with a recruiter who is REQUIRED to send out five new resumes every week and who gets all of his or her resumes off of the web?
Harrison was bragging recently at having made $5 million in a single year. Who knows if it is true, but it may well be. He's probably continued that streak. He's in business for money, pure and simple.
If you choose to work with these companies, you will be doing business with a guy who has negative references from most people who have known him throughout his life from boyhood to his current age of about 40. From an ex-wife, to his own father, to his fraternity brothers, to his former work colleagues, to his former and probably current employees, there are dozens of people who would stand up and say, "don't trust Harrison Barnes."
With that warning, do as you please.
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