Fragomen reviews

- Immigration firms make their money from the volume of cases they process. Offices operate like sweatshops, and the cases are generally formulaic and routine. The work is dull and unengaging. - If you start as a temp, expect to be treated with mild annoyance to outright condescension. Temps often find it intimidating to ask questions from attorneys or even other staff members because of the cynical work environment. - Work is unevenly distributed. Many attorneys exist simply to sign off on work done by junior staff. - Because of the condescending environment & uneven workload, new hires are poorly trained and make constant mistakes while working on cases. Escalations and angry clients are a daily occurrence. - Given the above points, turnover is extremely high. This constant turnover contributes to the uneven distribution of work and poor training. - There is no sense of teamwork. Many attorneys make poor managers; they do not have the skills to motivate their staff. - A dead-end position. OT pay is not worth constant stress and condescension.

Here are my humble observations: 1) You will be verbally berated, not if, but when things go wrong, as supervisors refuse to accept accountability and will routinely displace blame. This routinely takes place in front of other peers. When brought to HR's attention, they neglect to act. 2) Management and attorneys will be nice as long as you don't offer any opinions on implementing different perspectives. You will be passive aggressively excluded from the well-defined cliques. Purveying, negative comments are created and perpetuated to fit the narrative of the Supervising Paralegal. They are routinely spread in front of management who is unwilling to assess whether or not true or manipulation. 3) You can willingly volunteer your personal work/life balance and time with friends/loved ones to work upwards of 10 to 12 hour daily shifts only to be told next time ask first before dedicating time to extended projects. 4) Managing Attorneys, although claiming to have an open door policy, will bury their head in the sand to avoid confronting interoffice politics. 5) HR is aware of these continuing behaviors (see the other GlassDoor, Indeed and internet reviews for the Phoenix office) and do nothing to address the hostile work environment. 6) Turnover is extremely high for a reason. You see people routinely disappear because they simply cannot take it anymore. They are the smart ones to figure the Phoenix office culture out quickly and take action. 7) No matter how many cases you prepare, draft, file, you will always be considered not moving fast enough. You will openly be told other paralegals have an equal or more excessive workload and once you research, you find out just how false those claims really are. 8) Your cases will be routinely shifted to inexperienced legal assistants, paralegal and administrative staff. If anything goes awry, it will unequivocally be your fault. 9) Turnaround times for preparing, drafting, filing cases is unrealistic for the sake of attracting and retaining client's business. Good luck in requesting additional help from your supervisor. 10) Cases are drafted with considerable mistakes by one of Fragomen's teams abroad for U.S. based clients. You're told this is done to streamline case processing, however, to correct the mistakes made, you required to go back and familiarize yourself with the particulars. This adds to the time required to draft, which could have been ultimately accomplished by you and a team mate if the firm was sufficiently staffed.