Seen Yer Moment

Lately having flashbacks to my last job as a Senior Paralegal for an insurance defense firm for cases involving employee-employer L&I claims. Impressed with the fact the firm staff manager had to assign the only other, very busy paralegal, the task of actively watching me via the firm’s intranet, as I updated my billing and notes throughout the day, and to scrutinize all the information I had ever entered into the system, looking for flaws in my work. This was after weeks of me feeling the heat of a target on my back - ‘they’ had decided they wanted me gone. Obviously, the manager was having a hard time finding a serious issue with anything I had been doing, and therefore assigned my co-worker to the task of taking me down. I could hear everything my co-worker did in the next office; she told the secretary that she was unavailable for calls until further notice and she stopped making any phone calls - I could hear and feel her frustration at her assignment - she really was incredibly busy, we both were. The office manager had already given me a surprise call one morning and told me to keep track of every single thing I did in the office that day, and then send it to her at the end of the business day. It was exhausting, but I had no trouble accounting for my full day’s work. After I submitted the information for my documented day, I never heard about it again. I eventually asked what the manager thought about my submittal, and she briskly said it had looked fine. The firm had to work so hard to find a valid reason to terminate me, and even then, it was weak, and they used tardiness as their excuse. I was working 48+ hours a week as a single mom, and really could have telecommuted the entire time without issue - I had no reason to be in the office! I was often late,” but there was no reason that should have been a problem for anyone (and I’m sure it wasn’t). I was/am a hard worker, and that job was my second consecutive position with an insurance defense law firm. I now am confident that there is some kind of paralegal retention standard with the insurance companies that their legal counsel is expected to follow, and that retention rule is to not have any retention. Both firms I worked for told me during my interviews that they were severely understaffed, and nearly all of their paralegals no longer worked for them, recently departed, for one reason or another. I left my position as Jr. Paralegal with the first firm when I realized that everyone who had worked with me when I had initially joined the firm had been fired, and that I was the only one who remained. I took the position with the second firm because of the pay and the way the staff marketed the position to me - I was excited to work there, and I was explicitly told something along the lines of, oh we’re not like other firms at ALL, we are employee-centered and we love our employees. Left unexplained was the 3-desk vacancy - 4 paralegal positions being covered at the time of my interview by 1 paralegal. There were actually 2 paralegals working, and the 2nd was fired the day I started. I was told by my co-worker, the one who later had to analyze my intranet entries in preparation for my termination, that the terminated paralegal just “wasn’t a good fit.” She told me, with a bit of regret and fear in her expression, that the person had just signed the lease for a new apartment. She gritted her teeth and told me that her previous co-worker would figure it out, because she had to - she needed a place to live, and therefore she would find a way to somehow make paying her rent without an income work out for herself.