Avoid like the plague (particular unit in Jamaica, Queens) - Senior Associate Counsel Metropolitan Transportation Authority Employee Review

The unit is run by a megalomaniacal, Devil Wears Prada type character (minus the cinematic charm) who delights in micromanagement and regular gaslighting. Regardless of title, experience, or competence, the attorneys (and especially a new attorney) are treated as 1950s-stereotype assistants because of the manager's profound insecurities and what they themselves (with an apparently self-congratulatory connotation) characterize as "paranoia". Said manager jumps to rapid conclusions based on limited and often misinterpreted information and is then apt to reflect them in their approach to the employee. For example, when I missed a proverbial needle in reams of engineering mumbo-jumbo, there was a rapidly made inference that my reviews are "cursory" in nature and reflect some sort of a preternatural lack of attention to detail. In my tenure there, I was systematically excluded from meetings and did not travel to the HQ a single time after orientation. The unit chief concentrates many of the meetings on themselves and expects attorneys to either be quiet or channel the unit chief's line in the meetings they are admitted to. Some of those meetings take the form of what the unit chief themselves describes as "interrogation" of the clients. In terms of style, one is treated with narcissistic disrespect. Manager frequently relates (possibly apocryphal) anecdotes about senior leaders in the agency calling them and asking them to "clone" themselves because of their supposedly unique virtues. Because the place is in a Jamaica outpost, above the train hub, the Legal and agency's management never visit and apparently allow this craziness to fester without taking any action. High attrition in the unit is conveniently attributed to individual deficiencies of the personnel involved rather than to the foregoing systemic issues. In terms of legal skill development, notwithstanding the verbiage in the job description and the interview, my experience is that the focus is on endless prolongation of editing and coming up with reasons why things take long (e.g., by suggesting that other units are to blame) rather than on efficient and workmanlike progress of documents. Tellingly, I was criticized for an overly "commercial" disposition to documents, and reminded that the role is to create "roadblocks" (which were then corrected to "guardrails"). If one has an interest in promoting public sector efficiency and/or in one's professional development, this is not a place for you. These issues are exacerbated by a half-baked, poorly thought out integration of MTA legal units for individual operating agencies into a joint "HQ" legal department. In this new structure, the operating agencies' general counsels have no staff of their own and apparently serve more as figureheads who have to defer to unit chiefs like the one described (if they want any of their work needs addressed at some point), and so have no real standing to challenge the abuses and inefficiencies. But as if to double up on the failures of "integration" the legal unit recently added a layer of management under the GC with nebulous responsibilities! Nobody above the unit chief reached out to me to understand the issues related here.