Major clients including multinational companies, smart colleagues and a general co-operative environment. You learn quickly what companies seeking political risk advice want to know, and have serious exposure from the get go. Client facing happens from early on, and most colleagues are friendly, and decent people. Plenty of proper brains; diverse staff - lots of languages spoken. In principle, you can hop / move up to other divisions (Sales, Corporate Investigations).
Cons
They work their analysts hard, and they have quite a high rate of churn - analysts moving on every couple of years or so..... The Blackberry never stops (as it's a global firm, you get emails from offices round the world constantly).