Schulte Roth & Zabel Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Schulte Roth & Zabel full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – great experience, above-market bonus, good people. always got best tech support and other office amenities

Cons – life is hard for a corporate associate no matter where you are, but good to work at a firm where clients have deep pockets so they are not nickeling and diming their law firm

Advice to Senior Management – you can afford to hire smarter associates

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Schulte Roth & Zabel full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Great Benefits, some of the best in the industry. If you are a part of the support staff.

Cons – Some assignments are not challenging and no room for creativity

Advice to Senior Management – Give the staff assignments that can add value to the client and try to match new employees with areas that they are interested in

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Schulte Roth & Zabel

Pros – the benefits are not bad

Cons – unprofessional management, lot's of very lazy secretaries

Advice to Senior Management – n / a, n / a

Former Employee – worked at Schulte Roth & Zabel

Pros – There is an opportunity to make money via significant overtime which during the period I was there, was readily available. The perks connected to overtime work generally make doing the over time worth it.

Cons – The expectation for Paralegals is that you always be available at any moment to do what is asked of you by a Paralegal manager or an attorney. If you don't rearrange your personal life to fit their schedule, you will be unhappy and either want to quit or eventually be fired for not sacrificing your personal needs for the firm.

Advice to Senior Management – Attorneys should be trained and encouraged to view and treat paralegals as professionals rather than bottom dwellers who are at their beck and call at any time.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Schulte Roth & Zabel

Pros – in-house opps are the only options

Cons – no partnership opps, poor training

Advice to Senior Management – Start thinking longer term

Former Employee – worked at Schulte Roth & Zabel

Pros – good pay for the level of the work

Cons – management and personnel are unfriendly, in the sense that no one goes out of their way to welcome the new person

Advice to Senior Management – make more of an effort to accommodate new people into your social atmosphere so that they don't feel like they're being ignored

Current Employee – been working at Schulte Roth & Zabel

Pros – The firm is involved in many sophisticated legal matters. SRZ's compensation matches the market, and it has market vacation time.

Cons – SRZ is an awful place to work. The partnership ranks are not open to internal talent. The firm fancies itself a Cravath lite, but nothing is further from the truth. The support staff is not helpful, and often incompetent. The partners routinely scream at associates and have a well deserved reputation for being among the worst to work for in NYC.

Advice to Senior Management – SRZ is a firm that exists to line the pockets of its rainmakers. SRZ need to adopt a long term greedy strategy in order to continue to thrive. Such a strategy must be predicated on the assumption that internal talent matters and must be groomed.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Schulte Roth & Zabel

Pros – there was a good salary

Cons – there were many screaming partners

Advice to Senior Management – be nice to associates, staff and to all the other employees who work for you. Your reputation matters more than anything else.

Current Employee – been working at Schulte Roth & Zabel

Pros – Pay is on par with larger firms, but the size of the firm makes it easier for one to know others in one's immediate group as well as others in the firm.

Cons – Not the firm paricularly but the industry itself is taking quite a hit currently which makes future outlook murky at best.

Advice to Senior Management – More transparency in terms of the direction of the firm and also the financial outlook, esp. given the client base.

Current Employee – been working at Schulte Roth & Zabel full-time

Pros – SRZ is best known for its investment management practice, which was stellar, at least before the Great Recession of 2009 hit. The industry has been struggling ever since, so the opportunities to gain exposure to the hedge fund industry and its legal needs are a lot more limited. And that's as positive as I can get about this place.

Cons – Wow, where do I begin? HORRIBLE work environment, like most major NYC law firms. Some of the partners are knowledgeable, one of them is horrific and clueless (the private equity divorced lady - she needs to be fired; or at least fire her overweight cat-lady secretary), and ALL of them are stressed out a--holes, trying to make sure they attract enough clients to stay relevant. There are attempts by partners to pretend that they are cool (one over-botoxed female partner actually keeps a parrot in her office and struts around in overpriced quasi-couture, another litigation partner likes to emphasize his NYC roots as a stand-up comedian), but the bottom line is that all of the partners live and breathe by the rule of the billable hour. and that lifestyle has not been made easier by the current economic woes hitting the hedge fund industry, which is the industry that this firm is built around.

No one at this place knows your name, and there is no mentorship. They brag about the investment management department, and at one point it did have some impressive clients, but I think it is having a hard time staying afloat. I think it is basically a local New York Jewish firm, trying to pretend that it is as world-class as Cravath, Paul Weiss, and other such places. I spent most of my time trying to make sure I had enough work to keep up my billables (hard to do in a recession when senior associates and partners are hogging work that is typically sent to juniors). Like most law firms, it is essentially a billable-hours factory . . . except that there now are not enough billable hours to go around, which results in even more backstabbing than usual. Avoid this place.

Advice to Senior Management – Stop trying to be an international law firm with offices in London and D.C., when you know d*** well that you are just a local show. Stop running those splashy summer associate programs, when it would just make more economic sense to hire laterals and pay them more to do the same amount of work, if not more. And you won't have to spend more time and money training them. That's all the advice I can think of. I think SRZ, like most other NYC law firms, is ultimately handicapped when it comes to reforming its office culture, because it revolves around the billable hour. If there was a way for them to bring in extra streams of revenue, that would probably be good. The billable hour can't really go that far, while products can. But this is an issue the entire law firm industry faces, not just SRZ.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company