Friday, March 30, 2007

Hughes Hubbard & Reed: Low-Class Sweatshop

One firm that was left off the chart is Hughes, Hubbard and Reed. It pays below market--$35 / hour and is incredibly stingy across the board. The conditions on that project are horrendous, and the leadership is both incompetent and psychotic. They have an operation offsite like the Matrix with 100s of attorneys crammed into one room. They put the rest of the bodies in the bowels of the firm's main building in a windowless space with lead paint, asbestos, dust, blinding flourescent lights, a broken furnace that sets the room as either an arctic freezer in the winter or a sauna in the spring and some of the nastiest bathrooms in the city. The size of the overblown egos of the staff attorneys and 17th year associates are rivaled only by their waistlines--the Eggman and the Walrus personified. These uncredentialed, illiterate, ignorant and just plain dumb figures wield the micromillimeter of power they have to make other people's lives miserable. They stuck a babysitter ("Anita" equivalent) in a corner of one room to peak through the glass of a partition to spy on people in another room and instructed her to follow people to the bathroom to make sure they were really going to the bathroom. Then they had someone scrape the frosting off the glass with an ice scraper and a toxic chemical that converted the glass to plastic while people were working in that room. This project may rival the "Anita" project and Paul Weiss, and things promise to get worse still: the glass wall will come down (if only life were a Lewis Carol novel, Humpty Dumpty / the Eggman would sit on the wall and have a great fall), and more bodies will be crammed into the dank space making it even more of a fire hazard and health code violation than it already is. If anyone calls you with a job at HHR, hang up the phone and run away.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

That place was hell. Not only did I feel like I was working for the devil on that project, but the conditions were so poor that I literally felt like I was working in hell. We were shoved into an overcrowded room (fire hazard), the heat was oppressive, and there was the constant presence of body odor.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps bathing more often would have been in order, then? After a morning shower try one of the many "Anti-perspirants" available at your local shopping establishment. You'll be right as rain after a shower and Right Guard, and no one will ever complain about you again.

Stay Fresh!

Kyle

Anonymous said...

like 2 stalls and 2 urinals for a hundred guys

Anonymous said...

Just as Fat Bastard ate babies, the big, nasty, bald staff attorney at HHR eats temps. Since his tenure, he has engaged in a witch hunt, whimsically firing people for any cause, no cause, just cause, etc. He compares contract attorneys to non-attorney employees of the firm, even though many of them are far more credentialed than he. The only measuring scale on which he surpasses those he torments is not the LSAT, not the U.S. News Ranking of law schools, not law school GPA, not MBE scores, but weight.

Anonymous said...

Just as Fat Bastard ate babies, the big, nasty, bald staff attorney at HHR eats temps. Since his tenure, he has engaged in a witch hunt, whimsically firing people for any cause, no cause, just cause, etc. He compares contract attorneys to non-attorney employees of the firm, even though many of them are far more credentialed than he. The only measuring scale on which he surpasses those he torments is not the LSAT, not the U.S. News Ranking of law schools, not law school GPA, not MBE scores, but weight.

Anonymous said...

If these people are so bad and your credentials are so much better than theirs, why are you working for them?

Anonymous said...

I don't. I quit that shit-hole. Too bad for all those recent grads with huge loans and no experience though.

Anonymous said...

Oh stop it with your "why aren't you working for them if you are so good" bs. While Regent might suffice for a graduate looking to join DOJ, it does not suffice for "them." This profession is a complete scam.

Anonymous said...

I worked in that dump--what a nightmare! The bathrooms were the worst. One weekend someone sprayed shit all over the womes's bathroom. Appalling.

Anonymous said...

That place ruled. I worked there for a few months. Free pizza on Thursday nights from Lombardis...what more can you ask for!!!!

Of course sitting around until 2AM waiting for some jackass production assignment was pretty sweet.

It's a dirty place no doubt but so are the people who work there. Stop the whining and move on to real jobs- not more temp ones...

Anonymous said...

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Anonymous said...

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