Pros
You will earn taxable income.
Kontras
1) Terrible Training: Orientation and Training is comprised of the firm providing a PDF of the Employee Handbook. Upon being hired as a law clerk, I received literally no training (not even a cursory session with someone from HR) and was assigned to work for a Partner who lacked even a basic understanding of the firm's operational technologies. Accordingly, I spent an inordinate amount of teaching myself how to perform the necessary functions of my position (e.g., learn how to use iManage; find out that some documents are not stored on iManage and instead are stored on shared cloud drives accessed through Windows file explorer; attempt to figure out what documents to save on iManage vs. what to save on shared cloud drives; try to understand why some documents are saved on both iManage and the shared cloud drives; learn how to keep track of which case documents are saved on iManage and which are saved on shared cloud drives; realize the firm also haphazardly stores documents on the secure upload folders provided for client use). After becoming an attorney, the firm provided me no further training whatsoever, 2) Terrible Mentorship: The partners at GRSM were, in general, some of the worst people to work under. The majority of those I worked with did not show any interest in being a mentor. However, they did show themselves to be terrible people, so this may ultimately have been for the best. 3) Unfair & Inadequate Compensation: Very low salary. Moreover, the raises and bonuses are awarded arbitrarily. For example, in my second year as an Associate, I received a 20% raise and a $15k bonus. The following year, I billed the same number of hours (and had more notable accomplishments in my cases) but received a raise of about 5% and a bonus of $5k. I pointed out the discrepancy but was not ever provided an answer. 4) Insurance Carriers: The firm has a significant number of cases with insurance carriers. As such, there is a frustrating variety in billing protocols/standards. While one carrier might allow an associate attorney to bill a certain amount of time for legal research, others forbid it without prior authorization. Making this worse, there is often unclear or otherwise ambiguous language in the carrier's billing guidelines, which inevitably leads to confusion and/or debate about what tasks can be completed by an attorney and what must be completed by a paralegal (i.e., someone with a lower billing rate). This makes it almost impossible for an associate attorney to establish any consistent workflow, and often leads to tension with support staff. On top of this, the carriers will go through each billing entry and attempt to come up with a reason (even if none exists) to "write off" the time. Every month, one must dedicate a significant amount of very non-billable time to "appealing" these write offs (i.e., articulating, in writing, how you did in fact do the work that you recorded in your billing entries). Often, the carrier will then follow up with a request for the attorney to provide copies of the work they completed, as a means of further verifying that you did in fact complete the work that you recorded (and appealed). As a side note, I now work at a firm that does the majority of its cases with insurance carriers, however, they have taken the time to set up an infrastructure that addresses the inherent challenges of insurance carrier cases. All that to say, the work environment at GRSM is a matter of choice. They choose to place outsized importance on pleasing the insurance carriers and pass the cost along to the lowest people on the totem pole.