Attorneys: How would you like big law hours for boutique law pay? Be prepared to work minimum 1950 hours at a salary some paralegals wouldn’t take. And when I mean minimum, I mean if you’re tracking towards 1950 hours, your manager will ask you if you even want to work there. Bonuses and raises are comical. They won’t give you a sign-on bonus because they got burned once by someone who was smart enough to leave as soon as she could (and really, HR wasn’t smart enough to make a contingency). The pay is so abysmal that when you get a new job and overstate what you made at KR during negotiations, they will laugh at how low that is. Associates who’ve been there for years (some with kids!) work 12 hours and then go home, take a nap, wake up in the middle of the night and work more, take another nap, and then get their family ready for the day. That’s their everyday life. Then, the senior-most attorneys — who purport to be feminists who care about “all stages in women’s lives” — will leave at 4:45 and not do anything to make it possible for female associates to have work/life balance. If you're an attorney (even a partner!) who has worked there forever and put your hours in, but you make a mistake once, you'll get pulled from the big cases forever and everyone will gossip about it. It's insane.
Staff: Run, don’t walk. Your managers will be some of the most underqualified, manipulative and childish people you will ever meet. Administration Management and HR are clueless and are quite happy staying that way. They’re constantly on vacation, they don’t address complaints and they hire/promote middle managers that have no idea what they’re doing. They will lie to your face to get what they want. They will waste hours of meeting time talking about nothing work related (e.g. talking about themselves or their kids in obsessive length, or picking up/having full non-emergency personal phone call conversations during meetings). Sorry, no one wants to hear about your 20th trip to Disneyland. You're an adult. And if you report to attorneys, life won’t be better. One partner went through several assistants in a year because of how abusive she is. Nobody does anything about it. Everyone thinks it’s just so funny. Paralegals and legal assistants: the crap will roll downhill. Get ready for constant pressure, thankless work and very long hours waiting to file. You’ll also work with arrogant and incompetent marketing management. You’ll have to write things for marketing (their job) and hound them for information they should be giving you without prompting. The website and client intake continues to be an absolute mess but of course they say it’s not “their fault” even though they’re in charge of it. It’s full of typos, broken forms and awful photos. How are you supposed to look like a professional firm to potential clients and judges? So embarrassing.