Company Culture
Very little trust among the paralegals and the higher ups. Rather than commending, some will insult and others say nothing. Complaints to higher levels of management get ignored.
Support from management
Close to no employee involvement in decision making unless you're in someone's good books.
Teamwork
Everyone hates everyone and talks behind everyone's back
Freedom to work independently
Workload is distributed mostly to whoever does the best work, not distributed very fairly. Employees who can't do their own work by themselves because of laziness get their work divided among other teams rather than encouraging them to work harder.
Internal Communication
Meetings about this maybe one or twice a year.
Gender Equality
I saw no gender bias in this office.
Attitude towards older colleagues
This firm hires mostly fresh out of college individuals, the longer-serving colleagues are given more difficult positions but things are only decided based off seniority, rarely off accomplishments.
Career Development
None whatsoever. Most courses/classes are done in the DC branch, Rockville gets call ins or nothing at all. Nothing offered in terms of professional advancement that I saw.
Overall compensation for your work
salaries paid on time, wages are entry level and in my experience when the market changed, the entry level pay stayed the same. When HR informed them they were paying under market value, they raised everyone's base salary to the starting salary so older employees were now getting paid the same as new hires... Paralegals here get paid less than DC because they are technically not real paralegals, it's more of legal secretary work
Work-Life Balance
There is the ability to work an extra two hours a day to get Monday or Fridays off and to swap up to 2 hours of work a week but have make it up another day of that week. Vacation days are sometimes forced to taken for inclement weather when they close the office after calling you in which is often done.
Company Image
Only a few talk fondly of the company, most do not which IMO is the reality.
Job Security
There was risk for a bit of time, I'm not sure if this is still the case. The receptionist left before she could be laid off so now the paralegals rotate the front desk position. The legal field in general from what I've heard is at risk in general.
Handicapped Accessibility
It's all one floor with a ramp leading to the front door. There are no handicap mechanisms for doors though.
Workplace Safety
There's an "emergency team" but there's been no training or mention of safety during the years I was there. They do call us in during snowstorms, hurricanes and once we were during through a tornado and were told to huddle in the kitchen (yikes). When there was an earthquake though they did tell us to go home afterwards, but that was probably decided by the building's management company and not by our managers.
Challenging Work
Mindless and repetitive work
Inclusive / Diverse
Opinions are listened to and weighed against other methods of carrying out tasks. Sometimes upper levels of management ends up blocking the idea but they do try to push through good ideas.
Suggestions for improvement
- Care more about employees and get rid of useless ones rather than divvying up their work to others to support said useless employee's slacking. Said useless employee was also "promoted" to a more important position only because of seniority.
What I like about the company
Flexiblish working hours, decent healthcare benefits
What I dislike about the company
Rockville's manager doesn't seem to care about their employees and some team leads are micro managers or don't care at all. They wholeheartedly congratulate you on getting out of the company though. Employees that team leads like don't get to learn much else or move up to more important positions because they don't want to let go of the good team members in that position. They'd rather get rid of the bad employees and push them onto other teams/positions so the good employees don't get much chance to move on to learn more (even though they say they would)
