Pros
I’d like to preface by saying that my experience as a paralegal at this firm was a vastly pleasant one. I got to interact with people in difficult situations and speak with them in my native tongue (Spanish) on a daily basis. As a paralegal I provided services that were incredibly valuable, and most importantly, I felt like I was making a difference. The job itself was very rewarding, but the compensation and incentives to perform well were quite the opposite of rewarding, which is why I chose to after only 8 months of having this job. Don’t get me wrong, immigration law is still something I will continue to be passionate about and the learning curve is definitely manageable for anyone looking to break into this space with no experience. This firm does a good job of hiring people with little to no experience in law and teaching them what they have to know to get the job done. It ends up being a lot more simple and doable than one might expect upon first glance.
Cons
My many complaints lie primarily within the management at this firm. It’s a family owned law firm, so naturally there is some boundary breaking when it comes to nepotism, and things are still constantly being developed. As you might expect with any law firm, there is also favoritism and company politics, but I think it was only magnified at this law firm given that the vast majority of employees were hired because they had some connection to the head attorney or were not screened properly because of poor hiring practices that used to be in place. This boundary breaking was often to the detriment of paralegals as we sometimes dealt with clients in the firm who also had some type of personal connection with the attorneys or the family owning the firm that led them to feel entitled to set unrealistic expectations for us as paralegals managing hundreds of clients at a time. This firm definitely took on an uncapped number of clientele which usually also meant that paralegals just had to adapt to an influx of new people all the time and deal with angry clients on a weekly, sometimes daily basis as a result of the firm not being willing to hire more paralegals to keep up with the clientele. Besides the fact that the company didn’t have much of a management team from a business standpoint until recently, it’s definitely still in the midst of development. It wasn’t long before I realized how undeveloped so much of the company was, and I felt like a guinea pig in a lab being tested on involuntarily for most of my time there. The lack of people with a business background running the firm becomes very evident when you see management acting emotionally rather than logically, and making rash decisions rather than simply being reasonable. The HR lady is currently doing such great work cleaning up the mess that was previously in place and creating policies and procedures that any business should have upon its very inception. I ultimately chose to leave because I couldn’t afford to have a poorly run law firm be an impediment to my early career. Growth was very much capped at this firm, and while you can learn new subjects, you can’t really progress into much more than a team lead unless you go to law school and become an attorney. The firm has some incredible attorneys, and workers, but only a few people make the management decisions and sometimes they do so without figuring out what the people want, and instead just force the employees to fit into their preferred mold. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed my time there and the people were splendid! They were all great people! But even the greatest of people have no clue how to run a law firm. I’m hopeful things will get better now that there’s an HR lady to resolve the numerous issues, but I was ill prepared for the situation upon accepting the job.