A firm who listens to it's staff! - Senior Associate Simpson Millar Employee Review

Remote working is good and they are very flexible They don’t micro manage

Ineffective layers of middle management Really low pay compared to other competitor firms Bonuses don’t happen and annual pay reviews are fruitless. You will hardly ever get to do any client facing or active work - clients don’t come in to the office. Truly awful IT system, hard to get anything done. They will have lost so much money to this but feedback is not acted on. Very poor software and case management system. For some reason they will not pay for better software. No AI legal software utilization so there is too much time wasted on administrative work - you will spend most of your time either doing admin, battling with the IT system or case management software, or being harassed when your chargeables drop below 99%. You will feel like an overworked admin assistant as a fee earner. Ineffective billing process - you essentially have to do your own billing, which is nonchargeable of course. Excessively corporate, too much jargon: management like talking about finance and budget to employees who are not management and have no stake in this. A lot of saying and not much doing. ‘Mental health days’ , open rewards and random drinks evenings don’t make up for being paid the lowest in the publicly funded legal sector. Retention is very bad and people leave all the time. Some teams have lost almost the entire workforce in only 12 months. There is a culture of blaming and scapegoating certain employees and favouritism of others. Very petty and pedantic attitudes to file management, to the detriment of clients who hardly ever get to speak to their solicitors except by email.

Friendly, supportive team with a great culture Approachable management and team leaders Good opportunities for career progression Senior management have recently been making an effort to listen to employees and make improvements, but progress is extremely slow

Salaries are very low for the market, and salary increases are tiny They struggle with retention so there is a high turnover of colleagues Terrible IT