JAA Home

Current Newsletter

Events

Past Newsletters

Alumni Profiles

Class Notes

Contacts

JD-MBA Current Student Site

Profile: Jonathan Brodsky, JD-MBA Class of 2000

Northwestern JD-MBA Graduation Year: 2000
Undergraduate School: Syracuse University, B.A. in Political Science, M.A. International Relations with focus on Asian Studies
Employment: Advisory Research, Inc.
Title: Vice President and Research Analyst

AN: Can you tell us a little bit about your past and what you did before the JD-MBA program at Northwestern?

JB: During school I spent time studying in Asia, living in Taiwan, Beijing and Hong Kong. When I graduated, I went back and worked in China for a short time, doing public relations work for Ogilvy and Mather.

When I started at Northwestern Law, the JD-MBA program was four years long. After my first year of law school, I did internships for law firms in Chicago and Paris. It was difficult to get those jobs, and one of the negatives of the program at the time was that while firms would love to hire joint degree candidates, they did not want offer internships more than a year before a student was scheduled to finish school. That was a real negative of the four year program that’s been improved with the change to three years.

Though I did not have a lot of work experience at the time, I had taken the GMATs between first and second semester of law school and applied to begin studies at Kellogg after a year of law school. The following two summers I did business-focused internships at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, and doing debt work for Citigroup.

AN: What were your interests coming out of the JD-MBA program, and how did you end up pursuing a career in investment management?

JB: When I graduated in 2000, the market was still very strong prior to the dot-com crash, and there were a lot of great opportunities. I was recruited by a fellow Northwestern JD-MBA to work at Hambrecht & Quist, a small Investment Bank in San Francisco. I preferred the idea of working in the more friendly confines of a small investment bank, and because of its technology roots, H&Q historically had a strong tie to Asia, where I continued to have interest.

Two weeks after I started in the Technology M&A group, H&Q was bought by Chase. I left at the beginning of 2003 to take an offer to work in DC with the international division of the SEC. Though I did not directly practice law at the SEC, I had to put my legal hat on while acting as a consultant to different divisions of the SEC and to foreign governments regarding international securities issues.
The international division is often tapped by the enforcement division of the SEC to facilitate discussions with foreign regulators about cross border international securities issues. Also, after the U.S. invasion into Iraq, the international division was asked to help write the new securities laws for Iraq. Finally, following the passing of Sarbanes-Oxley, we were involved in policy-related work, trying to deal with loss of competitiveness of US exchanges due to the new reporting and board makeup requirements for companies, and the resulting shift of companies deciding to list in Hong Kong and the UK instead of the US.

AN: Can you tell us a little about your current firm, Advisory Research?

JB: Advisory Research is an investment management firm with $5 billion in assets that provides financial products to pension funds, institutions, and high net worth individuals.

My responsibilities at Advisory Research are to source and research investment ideas, and to manage international stock portfolios from a trading standpoint. We are an equity-only, long-only fund with a deep-value investment strategy. In other words, we look for companies whose tangible assets are trading at a discount to their market value. My portfolio focuses solely on international markets that tend to be less efficiently-priced than the US market.

AN: Given your background, do you think the curriculum in the Northwestern JD and MBA programs is international enough?

JB: I always found the international aspect of my studies interesting and I have tried to maintain such a focus in my career. From a career standpoint, the US is pretty developed, and in many cases there are faster growing opportunities overseas.

Kellogg was fantastic because of the large international student population. The Law School was fabulous because of the number students in the LLM program. Recently, my firm hired a Northwestern LLM to work for Advisory Research who also has an MBA from University of Chicago, who used to be a bankruptcy attorney from Argentina.

AN: Do you have any advice for the current JD-MBAs?

JB: At the end of the day, more and more career opportunities come from relationships. For many firms and job opportunities, resumes will come in by the hundreds on a day-to-day basis. To gain a competitive edge, it is important to build and maintain your contacts. One example of a way that I have built relationships is through contacting people in the Kellogg alumni database while traveling with my job. People are always receptive to meeting and being in touch.

AN: Thank you very much for your time with us today and thank you for your continued participation with the JD-MBA program and the alumni board.