Pros
Staff Attorneys and Legal Assistants are genuinely nice people. I am still in touch with my former co-workers.
Cons
Autocratic management style. PRC's practice of not taking into account the wishes of their employees to feel safe and not burnt out is best evidenced through their very high turn-over rate. During my time almost every staff attorney and legal assistant quit. Many departing employees cited two major issues:
1) Safety: Sometimes a very small minority of PRC clients threaten employees and bring weapons into PRC offices. While I was there PRC was refusing to adopt a policy that would even allow employees to ask clients to not bring weapons in. I and almost every co-worker I spoke to had an incident with a client harassing them or making them feel unsafe in some serious way (guns, knives, threats, verbal abuse, potential stalking). Many of these same folks told their supervisors about their very valid concerns for their safety and were usually pressured to just keep working with that client. Other employees reported being harassed by their supervisor and experiencing gender-based/ racially motivated inappropriate behavior. Employees would practically have to beg to not work with threatening clients and staff, even if they had direct proof.
2) Burnout: My client list quickly went up to 120-150 clients. To be clear, low pay and long hours in legal aid are a given. However, management's blase attitude towards the employees they habitually burnout should not be a given. PRC requires employees to bill around 28-32 billable units a day. One unit equals 15 minutes. PRC usually schedules at least two new client intakes a week. It is also not unusual to be responsible for one hearing a month, sometimes one hearing a week for 6-8 weeks in a row. Myself and the majority of other attorneys I socialized with were extremely burnt out and received no support and no real training. Most of us communicated to our supervisors and management about the burnout, but the only thing that would change would be these same employees. Most egregiously, some folks left PRC to go on leave, relying on State Disability Insurance (SDI) to help pay the bills. Then we started hearing from these employees that PRC had not been properly reporting employee earnings to SDI and that it was unclear if they would be able to collect SDI. It sounds like this same thing was happening for maternity leave too. Sadly, it seems like PRC is still not taking these issues seriously. While I was there one of the supervisors that had their entire team quit, and then most of that replaced team quit again - it sounds like that person was promoted to manage the entire Benefits Counseling team. All that to say, it does not look good for fixing the very serious issues discussed above.