A&O Shearman reviews

INEPT is a good all around word. At the time I left, IT was basically being dictated to by the Partnership. So what you have are non-technical people making technical decisions and driving technology for the company. It's a disastrous formula. Once upon a time, Shearman was cutting edge with technology. But then they slowly descended into bleeding edge technology. The IT Management is inept at best. Few of the managers are on the same page and therefore the teams are not on the same page. There is a lot of inter-team animosity and it's the end users that suffer for the lack of sync. The help desk is one of the worst I've ever encountered since it was outsourced to a truly inept company that seems to place more value with number of tickets closed than quality of work performed for the caller. Granted, users are babied in the firm and a good percentage of the calls to the help desk could be eliminated by users going to training. The Desktop Support team is normally a tight team, but they have so much to learn in terms of taking initiative to solving problems by themselves instead of needlessly escalating to 3rd level. Just like the Help Desk, they too ask the same questions over and over no matter how many times the answer has been given and even documented for them. 3rd level support is disjointed at best. Not many teams work well together. There is a lot of dead weight in 3rd level support. Many people who've been there a while should be fired for the good of the department and company. But with a management team that lacks a backbone to stand up to the partnership, they will continue to keep the dead weight on as their best and brightest leave to other law firms and opportunities. Compensation is low compared to other law firms, and bonuses and raises are pretty much non existent. There are very few that shine in the IT department.

They use diversity and inclusiveness as tools to try to inflate their egos and corporate status while doing very little for the actual minorities/LGBTQ community they hire. The job isn't difficult, but they keep showing these training videos every month. Some of them showing how diverse they are and bragging about it and others even explaining unions and how they should be allowed in the workplace...but, when it comes to actual wages or benefits, they pay far less and you get less benefits than what they pay employees in other countries. They then try to use Overtime numbers to "justify" giving the office a raise. It's a 24/7 processing firm and they have several around the globe. They give very limited PTO and holiday pay, they make everything more complicated than it needs to be with endless log ins and trainings from 2 different emails. They give you about a million things to keep track of, while dealing with unruly attorneys and being told to basically take animosity and verbal abuse from them to keep from getting in trouble. They spend money on things like ice-cream and then put them on blast as if they're trying to appease a bunch of children rather than giving us money that we need because we're adults. They do this with their diversity thing as well. They don't want to pay the diverse people what they're worth, but they'll pay for a whole team to be dedicated to putting on presentations and things constantly. It's all a show