Pros
Working as an honors paralegal presents recent college graduates with an opportunity to get involved with interesting cases. Unfortunately, that is about all you can really expect to get out of this opportunity, as the program needs significant overhaul to better serve the Commission and to ensure better productivity from its honors paralegal pool.
Cons
The honors paralegal position is a term-limited four year position, geared towards recent college graduates. While this sounds like a great parking space between undergrad and law school, it is far from conducive to growing your work skills. Attorneys view paralegals as disposable, and do not invest in them. This attitude is an outgrowth of two issues: (1) honors paralegals are term limited, and (2) they are detached from the case teams they serve. The honors paralegal program is too small, and thus case teams clamor for paralegal assistance in a climate of scarce resources. The Commission continues to expand its attorney group, while failing to keep the total number of paralegals in step with its needs. To briefly summarize how the program works, the honors paralegals are employees of the division of litigation and technology assistance (DLTA). The DLTA is a support function division, which farms its resources out to the various litigating divisions in the Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection. Each of the litigating divisions (ad practices, marketing practices, financial practices, privacy and identity protection, and enforcement) are siloed from each other. As such, the various divisions are unaware of urgent needs arising throughout the Commission. This often leads to competition and strife among attorneys to get paralegal resources. When conflicts arise, management does not do enough to help. Often honors paralegals are asked to work out the issue amongst competing divisions themselves. Think about that for a second. Young college grads, who are looked down upon as "temporary employees," are asked to tell groups of attorneys that they have competing work projects and must select one over the other. That is not an ideal situation to enter as a young recent-college graduate. While many attorneys and paralegals will tell you that the work you receive is "substantive," the truth is you will be doing a lot of document review and helping attorneys with basic microsoft programs like excel and word. The workforce at the Commission is not as technologically literate as one would hope, and they often place high expectations on younger staff to bridge the gap. It is hardly "substantive" to stand over an attorney's shoulder and help them reformat a word document, or help them open a document review tool that they refuse to learn how to use. Finally. the benefits for honors paralegals are pretty pathetic. They start you at a GS-07, without any potential to increase on the GS scale other than mere step increases. In a market like DC, a GS-07 does not get you far. The fact that you cannot earn any increase in pay, or that you must leave within four years, is just another manifestation of the priority the litigation groups place on the paralegals that help them.