Unprofessional and Spiteful - Paralegal Abramson Labor Group Employee Review

Overall, ALG is very collaborative and growing rapidly. Many of the staff are very helpful and happy to be a part of the team.

Rapid Growth = Consistent structure change, which may not be for everyone.

-Remote/work from home set up. -Autonomy to schedule your day as you want, so if you needed to run an errand/go to the doctor during the day, you could without needing to ask for approval from anyone.

-Unmanageable caseloads and daily metrics. Associates had 150+ cases (at one point close to 180), with the expectation that you would 'touch' at least 18 cases a day with a certain number of phone calls and emails per day. Their logic was that if you hit 18 a day, in two weeks (10 working days) you'd touch all your cases. In practice, this was not how it worked, as you would need to respond to active, high-priority cases over the backlog. There was also a culture of vanity metrics over substance. If we didn't have a reason to make a phone call, we were told to call opposing counsel anyway to check the box. My manager's advice was to make calls on Friday afternoon so that you'd get voicemails and not have to talk to anyone but hit the call goal for management to see we were making calls. Additional inefficiencies - everything had to be manually input into the client file, so every email and interaction with clients or opposing counsel had to be copy/pasted into the client file, calls had to be logged with notes for each call. This easily could have been automated. -No real work/life balance. While there was an unlimited PTO offered, if you took days off, you were expected to make up your numbers on your other days. This was challenging when daily goals were already a struggle to hit. At one point, there was a 2-week mandatory training but there was no reduction in daily/monthly metrics during the training. We were told to make up the difference before or after the training. -A majority of the cases (75%+ in my opinion) were questionable, and clients often had little or no evidence to support their claims. We were often operating based on he-said, she-said type of stuff. We were expected to make lemonade from this and push the other side to engage in pre-litigation discussions even when we may have flagged the case for disengagement. -The demand letters that were sent out were written by non-lawyers and were often nonsensical and had incorrect information about the case. It was after the demand letter was sent that an attorney was assigned to the case. This always seemed backwards and inefficient - many cases, once you dug in, had to be flagged for disengagement because they were meritless. We were told by management to keep pushing forward on cases anyway until we exhausted all efforts, even when a case was clearly a waste of time. It made it harder to hit goals when you had to spend time on these types of cases, which were the majority. These issues were raised to management, and the response was something like 'that's just how we do it here.' The goal was to process volume, not quality. -Constant alignment and process changes. I had a new paralegal every few weeks, which was a never-ending interruption to workflow. With constant turnover, you were often handed cases that were mid-stream and you were attorney number 2, 3, or even more that had 'worked' the case. This was frustrating to clients and opposing counsel. -Every 2 weeks or so, we'd have a 'check in' with our manager. She would rank your metrics amongst all the other associates, with their names blacked out so you only knew where you stood anonymously compared to everyone else. This was a toxic management tactic, in my opinion. -You need to keep track of cases you moved to settlement because bonuses were based on this metric, and there were sometimes discrepancies between the numbers management pulled and what was the actual number. -The firm has a poor reputation amongst the legal community. You'll hear this from many different opposing counsels and firms, which wears on you after a while.