If you are reading the reviews posted here, chances are you are considering working for Preferred Legal Support. Having worked there for about a year, here are a few words about my experience which I hope will help you in making your decision.
I applied to work at PLS after seeing an ad on Craigslist. If my memory serves me well, the ad was addressed to entry-level attorneys interested in litigation, offered hands-on training in employment litigation, and promised opportunities for advancement. During the interview, I was told that PLS works with other law firms on class actions. I was also told that the successful candidate was expected to interview potential class members in wage and hour litigation matters for a few weeks, and that once that period was over, he or she would be given more substantive legal work.
The legal job market being what it was, I accepted the job when it was offered to me at a salary of $50,000/year with medical benefits. Yes, the salary was very low but I thought that the experience and opportunities for career advancement would pay off in the long run. I believed I was joining an employment litigation firm as an associate attorney; I was actually excited to start the job
Little did I know, my work at PLS was nothing like that of an associate attorney.
My disappointments with that company began on the very first day of work. When I came in, I was given a big stack of HR paperwork to fill out and sign. As I reviewed it, I found glaring spelling and grammatical mistakes. I paused and wondered how a law firm could produce such shoddy writing. I underlined the errors and pointed them out to the staff person who was training me. He simply moved on and explained the computer telephone system which I used during the remainder of my time at PLS.
Something else caught my eye on that first day: the HR paperwork identified my title as “junior coordinator.” I didn’t understand what that meant; no one had mentioned it during the interview or in the follow up phone conversations. When I asked the HR manager whether it was an attorney position, my question clearly made her uncomfortable. She answered that yes, it was an attorney position.
In hindsight, I should have left on that first day.
See, my duties were to call potential class members and conduct a scripted interview with them about their experience working for the employer-defendant. As I asked questions and got answers, I completed a form on my computer screen, mostly by checking the appropriate boxes. The interviews sometimes took 45 minutes or an hour depending on the length of the script and the class member’s level of comprehension of the questions. We were told to follow the script very closely, be as quick as possible, tally the number of completed interviews, and submit our results to the person in charge of the “campaign” at the end of each day--all very mindlessly.
I should mention that the campaign manager was not an attorney. There were many non-attorney employees at PLS in fact—some who had not even completed college—who did the exact same thing that I did, i.e. call potential class members.
Although I was never reprimanded, I heard of other attorneys being fired for not completing enough interviews each day.
We sat in small cubicles in a windowless room doing essentially telemarketing work. Many of the people we called were annoyed, and many of them hung up the phone on us. Needless to say, it was nothing like what attorneys usually do.
Why would PLS hire attorneys, you might ask, when it could hire non-attorneys and pay them much less? Here’s how the company worked. The law firms directly involved in the litigation, i.e. class counsel, hired PLS to conduct interviews with class members. Once the litigation was over, class counsel and PLS shared the attorney’s fees awarded by the court. The fees obviously were based, at least in part, on the work we did, which, I believe, was computed at a much higher hourly rate than we were actually paid. Though I never saw documents proving this, this is my own understanding of, and conclusions about, PLS’ business model.
I made calls for almost a year. Except for a few research projects, I did very little legal work. I never got any feedback from management and I never had a single conversation with Jennifer Tell. No one ever asked me how I felt about my position and whether I was satisfied. The turnover rate was enormous but PLS didn’t care; attorneys who quit were quickly replaced with new ones who did the exact same thing.
Response to the review below dated November 29, 2012
Let me start by saying that, notwithstanding the author’s puny attempt at convincing the reader that she was an employee at PLS, I am certain that she was not.
First, I did not meet one--not even one--attorney who enjoyed working at PLS. Everyone who worked there did it because there was literally no other jobs out there and because they needed to pay the bills. Everyone was looking for another job. I certainly was.
Second, the author’s patent disdain and scorn for the attorneys who worked at PLS belies her pathetic attempt at convincing the reader that she was one of us. Notice how she refers to the attorneys at PLS in the third person, obviously excluding herself. “By sheer force of THEIR work-ethic and positive attitude,” she tells us, “THEY are given an opportunity to succeed.” She then insults us, saying that we are “a bunch of misfits, people that no other employer would probably hire.” In her most ludicrous—and sly—comment, she tells us that the high turnover rate was not the result of the universal aversion of working at PLS, but was due to some of the attorneys’ poor performance. Considering that what we did was the equivalent of mindless telemarketing--her idiotic attempt at distinguishing telemarketing from our work notwithstanding-- no one performed poorly. But my main point is that no attorney who worked for PLS could have written about their experience with such vulgar contempt for their peers. By contrast, the author runs to the defense of PLS as if the attacks directed against it—have they been deleted?—were aimed personally at her.
No one interacted with the CEO: she was totally aloof of everyone and kept to herself. I, like all of my peers, barely ever spoke with her. The author’s intimate knowledge of the CEO, the establishment of PLS and its early days, leaves little doubt as to her true identity. She tells us that when the CEO first started the company “she was willing to take a chance on a bunch of misfits, people that no other employer would probably hire.” She then says that the turnover rate is “a reflection of the risk that a CEO was willing to take to give people jobs.” Evidently, the author wants to lionize the CEO, tell the reader that she is a doer of good, to whom we should be grateful for having giving us a second chance.
Have you ever heard of an employee, ostensibly writing a “fair” review, praise his or her boss with such passion? I haven’t.
The author’s deception and sly trickery is unmistakable. Having written her vulgar, spiteful, and dim-witted comments, she then feels entitled to lecture and pontificate to the reader, evincing her warped, psychotic sense of reality in the face of universal dislike of PLS. She is pitiful. One has the urge to shake her and say: stop the lies, and wake up to the real world. Clean the pus from your eyes and see a therapist to get over your delusions. Work in a different industry, you clearly failed in this one. Get treatment for your insecurities instead of projecting them on others. And most of all, learn to be less hateful and maybe—just maybe—your life will be less miserable. The reality is that PLS is a horrible place to work in.
