Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen, & Loewy Reviews

Pros

Friendly helpful people, distinct system/ way fo doing things, decent pay, good benefits, interesting work.

Cons

Uneven work load, busy sometimes, slow others- slow times make for job security paranoia, management is uneven and not necessarily in your corner. it's a paralegal powered machine, like hamsters in wheels and about as valued.

Advice to Senior Management

Communication, and training are key. Good people need support.

Pros

It's a great place to improve interpersonal skills, time management, problem solving skills and learn immigration law. The folks are generally nice. The schedule isn't rigid.

Cons

Understaffing makes everyone's job exhausting due to very high volume of work. Clients can be very demanding.

Standardizing processes = monotonous work.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire interns.

Pros

You will learn a lot about immigration law, business immigration law that is, at Fragomen because you will be forced to. Maybe you will be lucky to get a good manager who will teach you something and not leave you to sink or swim on your own.

Cons

Fragomen works hard at hiring young people from top-tier schools and almost always has openings. You're interview and first week will be a honey-moon (the HR department courts all its new APs) but then will have to hit the ground running. Welcome to corporate slavery. Fragomen has a high employee turn over rate an less than 50% of Assistant Paralegals make it through 2 years.

You will have to do a lawyers job at Fragomen whether your a paralegal, legal assistant, or simple team manager (people who are meant to manage mail correspondence). You will get no useful training whatsoever to complete your tasks and manage the responsibilities you have for your caseload.

Caseloads are inconsistent, rushed, and rarely manageable. There are few Fragomen paralegals who go home on time and its more rare to go home completing all of one's work. Team leaders frequently put client opinions and wishes (possible or not) before their employees well-being and rarely take into consideration what is reasonably doable in a day's time.

All "lower" employees (non-lawyers and non-CSMs) do repetitive work literally filing out paper work all day in front of a computer screen. You will not be taught more than the bare minimum and will rarely interact with your clients (lawyers and CSMs take credit for all of their team's work on the client side). Talking with fellow employees is highly discouraged by team leaders who would chain you to your desk if they could. It is not uncommon for people to work through their lunch (which is time you are unpaid and clocked out) because they are afraid of losing their jobs.

The expectations of partners and associates are unattainable. You're expected to know everything the moment you step in, even if you have no background in law, no JD, and no experience with immigration. You are given full responsibility for your cases (lawyers do little or no work besides signing papers and billing clients) which is a very scary thing when you are dealing with people's legal status in the U.S.

This is a burn-out job. You'll work long hours for leaders who severely underrate and under-appreciate your work. I have also heard Fragomen paralegaling called the "black hole" because many people are so miserable but have become so pigeon-holed in their positions that they cannot escape.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop using your HR department to cope for all the human functions (training, criticism, case problem solving and management) your managers are too incompetent, stressed-out, and nasty to do themselves.

Stop treating people like machines and creating unlivable expectations for new, green employees.

Create a reasonable training program and provide more support to green employees. The training is a joke and your APs are frequently bearing too much responsibility for their cases.

Pros

Benefits (health insurance, retirement plans, PTO) are about on par with other law firms and companies; great workplace diversity; blue jeans and free breakfast on Fridays; fairly lax in terms of hours and demands; requested time off is almost always given without issue; decent camaraderie within project teams; seemingly no distinction or "barriers" between and among the attorneys, paralegals, management, etc.

Cons

To say that their training program is a waste of time would be to say that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west... for the first week, we were subjected to various presentations and slideshows that were incredibly superfluous and, even worse, not helpful at all in terms of preparing us for the actual work environment. HR and management do a horribly deceiving job at making new hires feel welcome, excited, and prepared for the tasks they will perform, only to subject the vast majority of them to weekly, month-long "performance review plans", where the HR department essentially acts as a liaison between management and the bottom tier of paralegals, offering hardly constructive criticisms on what they are doing wrong and offering little in terms of encouragement or advice to improve for the future. I was hired with nine other people towards the end of July 2011, and employed with the company for slightly more than four months (at which point I found a much more suitable and intriguing opportunity). At least three of the people with whom I did training were either encouraged to leave, or outright fired within that timeframe (and this does not include a second round of new hires who joined roughly two months after we did, at least one of which was also let go during that time period.)

It seems as though there are genuine infrastructural and institutional problems in terms of Fragomen's hiring process and employee retention and development programs. As previously stated, the training program does absolutely nothing to prepare new hires for the work they will perform. Fragomen is almost exclusively an immigration law firm, and the vast majority of assistant paralegals (the very bottom rung on the corporate ladder) are young adults freshly out of college (maybe some graduate school), with little to no experience in immigration law, or immigration in general. "AP's" (the colloquial nickname for assistant paralegals) are expected to have a phenomenally short learning curve, and to make absolutely zero mistakes, in what appears to be an effort to almost completely reduce the relevance of, and work needed to be done, by management, as well as the associates and partners who seem to do exceedingly little. I can safely say that this is just about the only law firm of which I have ever heard where you are actually *encouraged* to work slower and bill less, for the sake of reducing the amount of work management must do in a given day.

And this really goes without saying, but the work done in a given day is monotonous, boring, and lethally repetitive. If you are considering pursuing a career in law, or as a paralegal, my word of advice would be to stay the hell away from Fragomen. It should come as no surprise that they are constantly hiring and have openings. I'm confident a simple review would show an employee turnover rate that far exceeds any comparable firm or company. I can truly say that despite the amenities and efforts to make Fragomen a desirable place to work, it is not enjoyable and the vast majority of entry-level employees are more than displeased with the overall environment.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop using HR as a mechanism to review employees, and instead give sound, useful, constructive advice directly to those who need it; cool off on the insistence that forms and documents be absolutely flawless on the first draft, especially for new employees; develop a training program that actually provides help and insight as to what the new hires can realistically expect to do while employed

Pros

Great salary, flexible hours, polite attorneys, company perks & parties, fair PTO & sick time, no minimum billing requirement. Great office location.

Cons

Work load is uneven - too much one week, little the other; senior paralegals get more opportunity to bill and hand pick the best cases.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep doing what you're doing! The Firm is great! It would be nice to have end of year bonuses for paralegals. Bring back the 15 days PTO minimum.

Pros

healthcare benefits are great. decent vacation time, just be prepared to work like a dog before and after any time off. the internal training is great, I mean they wrote the textbooks on most of this stuff, so they do know their stuff, great place to get experience. immigration law changed? they have committees that study and analyze it and send out a client alert before it hits the evening news.

Cons

you will make significantly less than your counterparts at other firms, while carrying more responsibility, more caseload. you can be immaculate in all your work, but they will only remember the one time you messed up (even though not your fault since it went through extensive multi-tier reviews). every flaw will be spotlighted at your annual review, and you will receive token raises for cost of living. you will be constantly pushed to produce ever increasing petitions, while completing 20 checklists for each, and get ready for lots of data entry. a very unhappy place where people are expected to work as many hours as needed to keep the clients happy. unrealistic expectations galore. very stressfull....

Advice to Senior Management

stop lying to your staff about the financial state of the firm, they do the billing remember? there is plenty of money for raises, and maybe you can start contributing to the 401k again! you cannot expect people to stick around when you treat them poorly and pay them beans.

Pros

Good pay. Most of the co-workers were very approachable and really nice when it came to questions I had about cases. Very good when it came to asking for vacation or just needed time off.

Cons

Sweat shop! Very stressful environment. Absolutely no room for error. Worked close to 80 hours a week on some occasions.

Advice to Senior Management

One word: "Streamline". It seemed like there were 3 immediate supervisors plus attorneys that were involved in a variety of cases at a given time. It was very confusing and stressful.

Pros

Business casual attire, no issues if you need to come in late or leave early occasionally for a doctor's appointment, very good group of co-workers, most non-attorneys are non-exempt, no billable hours.

Cons

Upper-management is so worried about maintaining their bonuses that they are working the rank and file to the bone. With no new hiring, despite a significant increase in business, there is no opportunity for upward mobility. Also, while the overtime does help to make up for only getting one small raise in the last two years, it would be nice to not feel under constant stress.

Advice to Senior Management

People cannot work at maximum capacity indefinitely. We need more new blood both to reduce our stress, and give us hope of future advancement.

Pros

Good salary but no long term prospects

Cons

Lack of work life balance, recognition from top.

Advice to Senior Management

Invest in employees' welfare

Pros

pay is good for long term employees/environment within some teams is pretty congenial/ability to work independently/some really great people/vacation time is good if you can take time off/technologically advanced/good practice communication

Cons

sweatshop/inconsistency in treatment of people, some teams great, others not/poor management/partners focused on the $$$$ high element of greed/understaffed/political/communication very poor

Advice to Senior Management

Seriously need to adjust your revenue expectations/work on being more transparent/staff up/do surveys of your staff and when you get responses, acknowledge them