Acceptable for first job out of school - Anonymous employee Paradigm Partners Employee Review

People were treated with respect in my experience. I was in production for several years and I was never subject to any hostility or unfairness. Most of the time I felt like the people there were almost family. On a personal level, I'd go out of my way to help anyone there. I went from unpaid intern, to paid intern, to respected team member with a window office and good rapport with management quickly. If you care about doing a good job, the upper management will notice. Hard work was appreciated and raises were appropriate. Overall, it is a stable, flexible, relatively relaxed career with a salary that you can raise a lower middle class family on. The turnover rate really isn't too bad at all considering it is an office full of young, ambitious, individuals with expensive educations, many of which came on around the time of the 2009 recession. I ended up leaving since my new position was offering like $45k more a year, but even then it was kinda hard go move on.

It is a small, but growing firm. While good work is acknowledged, there is a limit to how high you can go by conventional means. As it stood when I left, really hard work and good people skills will get you a middle management position overseeing 3-4 other attorneys and some training responsibilities. If you want to work your way up past that, you will probably need to carve out your own niche by being proactive on setting up new service lines or something. I'm not saying it is a dead end job by any means, but if you have $300,000 in law school debt from Yale or something, you may feel a big stagnant and disenfranchised after a few years. I wore several hats there, so it was less of an issue for me, but straight R&D Tax credit work can be frustrating. It is a lot of "hurry up and wait", begging for information from machine shop secretaries, and documentation, but overall not particularly difficult. If you are trying to always grow by learning new and complex skill sets, you will probably get bored. You'll improve your skills in talking with C-level people from a wide range of industries, your attention to details, etc...but don't expect to make a bunch of high end connections or insider secrets on starting your own firm.

Co-workers are nice. That's the best part of working there. Clients are fairly good too.

The management is not good. There is an environment of blame. Collaboration is not valued. There is a complete lack of transparency. They will ask you to do things that are unethical. They are not open to discussions of where the line of what is ethical is. They keep employees who are toxic and abusive. Specifically, men make jokes about rape, or ask women if they are on their periods. Management knows, but will not act. That same person has had complaints from many of the women who work there, but management allows his abuses to continue. What is more outlandish, is this is in the group where most are attorneys. Moreover, management's solution to this is to just let the people that complain work from home.