Vantaggi
- Good place to learn... if you are a quick learner. - Generous PTO benefits. - Depending on your team placement, you may have the opportunity to work with an experienced paralegal who will take the time to train you effectively.
Svantaggi
- If you show any initiative/work ethic at all, they will throw a backbreaking amount of work on you. - The employee turnover rate is so high, you are constantly picking up cases that someone started, and have no idea where it might be in the process. - No real training. The only way to successfully learn the inner workings of the job is to have a more senior paralegal who is willing to take the time to sit down with you and teach you how to be successful. - As others have stated, your experience will truly depend on the team you are placed on/hired onto. A handful of the attorneys are truly good people, who respect your position as a caseworker, and understand that you probably have no immigration experience. Other attorneys expect you to have read the entirety of 8CFR on the weekend before you started at the firm. - Opportunities for growth are forced upon you. Toward the end of my tenure at the firm, our team was so short staffed that I was tasked with drafting responses to Requests for Evidence issued by the government. This is a job traditionally handled by an attorney, but was thrust upon me, an Assistant Paralegal I, with 1.5 years of experience. While they were certainly interesting cases to work on, they involved several hours of research and gathering of evidence, on top of my normal caseload. - No opportunities for professional development. We never had any opportunities for firm wide training, instruction, or networking events sponsored by the firm. Not that the paralegals at the firm would have had any time to attend these events, but they would have been a nice thought. - Lastly, nearly all of the paralegals that I worked closely with were negatively affected by the working environment in some way. I will only speak for myself, but my mental health took a turn for the worse as my teams situation continued to deteriorate. On more than one occasion I woke up from a fever dream, thinking that I had forgotten something about a case and was being berated by an attorney. I can happily say that I have been out the firm for nearly 4 months, and I am so much happier.