Fragomen reviews

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.

The downside is that this firm doesn’t know how to develop or keep talent. This is the kind of place where they will absolutely push you out to save their bottom line. Abysmal employee appreciation initiatives. Low pay compared to other firms. And management/HR lack the basic fundamentals of transparency in employment structures. They’ll say one thing and do another, and then blame you for being confused.