Brown Sims PC Reviews

The business model is to take fresh law school grads, sweat shop and exploit them until they leave, rinse, repeat, reap the profits of their work and never reward or acknowledge them. The partners (shareholders) don’t care about associates or their growth or development. They will cut your hours and take them for themselves. Promotions are based on popularity and fraternizing instead of performance and objective criteria. The mood is always foul with constant drama and gossip. Go somewhere else!

The divisions are so segregated and have so little interaction with one another, that it's difficult for a "con" to apply to the entire firm as a whole. Yet herein lies a large issue: this is the least social group of attorneys I've never encountered. Your day-to-day will consist of showing up, going into your office, billing your 10 hours, and leaving. You eat lunch at your desk. You have no officemate. There is very little guidance and absolutely no mentorship program within their firm. As you sit in your office working the vice president, president, and shareholders will walk around halls peering in to ensure you're billing. You'll feel like you're working in a panopticon or a law sweatshop every day. The remainder of my review must be confined to the "Defense Base Act" division of the firm and does not reflect the firm as a whole. The worst part about this division is "the clique." Of course this is coming from an outsider obviously, so take this with a grain of salt. If you are in, you can get away with a lot. Puffing your billing hours, mani/pedi breaks at lunch, and sloppy work product (i.e., work with rudimentary misspellings, wrong words, and grammatical errors) are the norm. If you do not fit in, then you will be mercilessly mocked by your own peers. For example, the third week at the firm a shareholder and several associates went to a happy hour (this was the one social event in 5.5 months and the one exception to the above critique). The entire 4-hour conversation revolved around office gossip. One could hope your peers have more substance to them than just talking about each other, wishful thinking when it comes to Brown Sims though. Nonetheless, I understand gossip is a natural and unavoidable result of working in an office so it went on. More importantly though, it became one of the most unprofessional and quite frankly immature conversations I've ever heard. They began debating whether one associate (who to her credit is extremely bright, has immaculate work product, but unfortunately was no in their clique) was a hermaphrodite and had a micro-penis (I wish I was making this up, but I didn't even know it existed until one of them pulled up pictures of them). Now I wish I could say the immature was confined to a couple of baby attorneys. But the most unfortunately part of it all was a shareholder was present and egged the entire thing on. The problems at this firm cannot be remedied by simply moving people around because they can be traced all the way up into the upper echelons of the firm.