Pros
Hughes hires their litigation paralegals right out of college (with the expectation that they will go to law school after one year). They hire for specific case needs, so often you will work for just one major client along with some smaller clients or pro-bono cases. The litigation paralegal work ranges from preparing binders to actually drafting motions - it's all dependent on which clients you're working for and what teams you're on. Some paralegals are mostly doing para-administrative tasks which can be boring, while others are more involved in the research and data analysis components of cases. There are career paralegals in Hughes' satellite offices and a couple in New York, but most of the New York paralegals are recently graduated from college and considering law school. Compared to other firms, Hughes only requires a one year commitment from their paralegals. The management believes that this is the only way they can attract paralegals who are willing to put in long hours and deal with the oftentimes tedious work. Turnover of paralegals is therefore very high and the main hiring period is during June and July. However, since the recession and the bleak outlook of career prospects out of law school, some paralegals are beginning to stay longer. The managing partner likes to see an average of 150 billable hours a month. You are eligible for a 3% salary raise at the end of the year, although I've heard of people not getting this because their hours were not high enough. Overtime is time and a half, and it's very dependent on your case whether you'll be working a lot of overtime or not. Base salary is $40,000 with terrible benefits; my experience was that with overtime I made about $62,000. Hughes markets itself as having very friendly attorneys, but take this with a grain of salt in the current economic climate: the firm relies only few partners to bring in clients and most attorneys are worried about keeping their jobs, so they are generally too busy looking out for themselves to really mentor anyone.
Cons
No career advancement; free but poor tasting coffee; new financial management has forced the firm to become increasingly cheap; HR department is quite mean; hours are unpredictable; attorneys are paranoid and desperate to stay employed and sometimes very unfriendly; other paralegals can sometimes be clique-y