Pros
If you're considered"part of the family", you will get a lot of favoritism. Firm pays overtime to the minute for non-exempt employees. Firm contributes to your 401k annually whether or not you do. Percentage depends of how the Firm is performing but on average, 5% of your annual income. Firm gives up to 5% raise per year, but this is subject to change based on firm's performance. Firm gives annual performance review bonus which can be $1,500-$3k. This is also based on a percentage. Firm gives annual holiday bonus of $1,500. Firm celebrates many holidays with luncheons and does annual Halloween contest and annual chili cook off. Firm does annual summer picnic and holiday party. Firm provides breakfast on Fridays (bagels, donuts, muffins, fruit, yogurt). Firm does a month end luncheon for all staff. Firm does a month end birthday/anniversary celebration with a huge cake celebrating all birthdays and anniversaries that land in that month with a raffle at the beginning for gift cards (incentive to get you to come).
Cons
Major favoritism and nepotism runs rampant in this firm! Lots of siblings and cousins working here that are all related to management and get special priority, new job positions with higher pay, ability to come and go as they please, ability to work less hours to go back to school, flexibility to get their children even if that interferes with work hours, etc, all of which is NOT afforded to other employees. If you're not a favorite or a relative, you better lay under the radar for everything cuz management is not to be trusted. They smile and are nice to your face getting you to open up about your personal life then using it against you. While the firm does give generous annual raises, beware when a recession hits or the firm claims they are in a financial bind cuz that is when they'll cut any staff member that has senior status due to years in the industry, particularly cutting their non-favorite highest-paid in the department, employees. I.T. sucks crap! The head of the department is a firm favorite so instead of firing the entire lazy and/or non-experienced department from the head down (including the top 2 firm favorites that "run" (or pretend to run) the entire IT department), so they can literally have a clean slate and get a qualified department together to handle their non-stop growth in the firm, they simply turn a blind eye to non-stop incompetence. When you hear shareholders saying that if it was up to them they'd fire everyone from the top down in that department if it were up to them, that says it all! This firm has been on a non-stop TOP HEAVY growth pattern for nearly a decade! The President of the firm wants to play with the big boys and put the firm at a "big law firm" status. Does anyone remember Brobeck??? What does this mean? It means that every single WEEK 2-3 emails come out welcoming new shareholders on board, new lawyers and a handful of new paralegals over time but very rarely ever any new staff unless someone left and they're replacing them, hence why they are truly TOP HEAVY and eventually, without enough support staff below all those new hires and new offices, will come the sinking ship! There's only so long this growth model can be sustained. Brobeck did this and in the end, they sunk! The firm used the pandemic as an excuse to cut at least $2m of salaries by cutting a ton of staff, going super lean on total staff count, and piling up the work on the staff that was left all the while boasting (on their pandemic calls) that the firm is completely financially stable and no one needs to worry... code for, if you're bringing in more money in our deep pockets you're secure, but if you're staff (who is just overhead to us) we'll chop you as soon as we can... unless of course you're a favorite or a relative (nice side of the fence to be on, if you can get there). They even changed their secretarial model from 1 secretary assigned to 4 or 5 lawyers/paralegals to... they put all the secretaries from ALL offices into a "pool" per department and the lawyers then email the pool for their department to get help.. from any secretary available in any office location (not just their office) and they no longer have their own secretary. So basically the secretary structure is now no different than word processing (they call them "pro tecs") because the lawyer has no choice of who they'll get and may never have worked with or met that person before. Last up, time off. Like most greedy firms these days, they want employees to work to the grave and barely take any time off. They offer only 10 vacation days when you start (2 weeks) and then you have to wait till beginning of 6th year for 5 more days (1 more week) then wait till beginning of 11th year to get 5 more days (1 more week) which then caps you out at 20 days (4 weeks). Sick time is a flat 8 days a year and never changes. The staff have many clicks and several gossips that literally tear apart every new woman that comes on board, meaning, they start talking behind her back and spreading gossip about her like wildfire... until the next fresh blood comes on board. It's really ugly and management turns a blind eye. There you go... the good, the bad, and the ugly. You decide what's worth it or not.
